Homopus

Uncredited · via Wikidata/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Also called
- cape tortoisePBDB
- Sits inside
- TestudinidaePBDB
- Diet
- herbivore, herbivorePBDB, for Testudinidae
- Life habit
- ground dwellingPBDB, for Testudinidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Testudinidae
Time the record covers
At least 45 million years on record.
The record covers at least 48.07 Mya to 2.58 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 56 Mya to 11.7 ka.
5 occurrences of Homopus on record, most of them in the Miocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
5 occurrences- Eocene20%
- Miocene57%
- Pliocene3%
- Pleistocene20%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
2 formations
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Homopus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 3 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Homopus and its relatives
MioceneWhere Homopus and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
49 taxa- Afrosmilus africanus1 site
- Arctocephalus pusillus1 site
- Argillochelys antiqua1 site
- Argillochelys convexa1 site
- Argillochelys cuneiceps1 site
- Argillochelys subcristata1 site
- Bathyergus suillus1 site
- Boidae1 site
- Bovidae1 site
- Caracal caracal1 site
- Chersina angulata1 site
- Colubrinae1 site
- Connochaetes gnou1 site
- Diceros bicornis1 site
- Eosphargis gigas1 site
- Equus1 site
- Felis lybica1 site
- Germanostenolestes lutzi1 site
- Hecubides euryodon1 site
- Heeralydus bucculatus1 site
- Hippotragus leucophaeus1 site
- Hyaenidae1 site
- Hystrix africaeaustralis1 site
- Lacertilia1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 5 sites for Homopus, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
4 references- Lydekker, 18892
- The Ysterfontein 1 Middle Stone Age rock shelter and the evolution of coastal foraging1
- Miocene Chelonians from southern Namibia1
- A new species of fossil Homopus (Cryptodira: Testudinidae) from South Africa1
Each of the 5 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1

Picture of Homopus
- Source
- Wikidata/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- not stated by the source
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
No 3D scan of Homopus was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itTestudinidae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Duméril and Bibron 1834