A LARGE BAENID TURTLE CLAW Baenidae indet. Late Cretaceous Period (approximately 76 million years ago) Judith River Formation, Montana, USA 15/16 x 2 13/16 x 3/4 inches (2.4 x 7.1 x 1.9 cm) Dinosaurs almost always take centre stage in the story of the ancient reptiles — but the shelled reptiles, the turtles, quietly hold one of the most extraordinary biographies in the fossil record. Their lineage predates the first dinosaurs by some forty million years. They lived alongside them for the whole of the Mesozoic. And they walked out the other side of the End-Cretaceous mass extinction effectively unchanged. Few designs in the history of life have so completely answered every challenge thrown at them. The Baenidae were a distinctively North American family of freshwater turtles. Throughout the Late Cretaceous, they were the dominant aquatic chelonians of the Western Interior, inhabiting the subtropical rivers, coastal floodplains, and seasonally inundated swamps that characterised the Judith River environment. Their robust, often deeply sculpted shells and powerful limbs made them formidable in their own quiet way — patient predators of fish, molluscs, and the soft vegetation of the river margins. The present claw is an exceptionally pleasing relic of one of these large, ancient survivors. It belonged to an animal that shared its world with the great horned dinosaurs and apex tyrannosaurs of the Judith River — and whose direct descendants are still moving slowly through North American waters today.
