Discovery News:Tough Turtle Survived What Dinosaurs Couldn't

The hearty river turtle outlived the meteor that killed off dinosaurs.

THE GIST

• The turtle evolved strategies for dealing with environmental problems.
• Boremys eventually went extinct, probably due to predation by mammals.

Reconstruction of the baenid turtle Boremys basking on a Triceratops dinosaur skull.

A tough river turtle, Boremys, not only survived the meteorite impact that likely wiped out the dinosaurs, but it also seemed completely unfazed by the catastrophic event, according to a new Society of Vertebrate Paleontology paper.
The discovery shows that the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction 65-million-years ago was non-random, meaning that some groups perished completely (non-avian dinosaurs and many marine species), some groups suffered heavy losses, while other groups, like turtles, did very well.
"We believe that aquatic turtles were particularly resilient to the meteorite impact because they naturally possess a wide behavioral repertoire that allows them to survive bad times," co-author Walter Joyce of the University of Tubingen's Institute for Earth Sciences told Discovery News.