Fossil Record
Turtle fossils of hatchling and nestling size have been documented in the scientific literature. Paleontologists from North Carolina State University have found the fossilized remains of the world's largest turtle in a coal mine in Colombia. The specimen named as Carbonemys cofrinii is around 60 million years old and nearly 8 ft long.
On a few rare occasions paleontologists succeeded in unearthing large numbers of Jurassic or Cretacious turtle skeletons accumulated in a single area (the Nemegt Formation in Mongolia, the Turtle Graveyard in North Dakota, or the Black Mountain Turtle Layer in Wyoming). The most spectacular find of this kind to date occurred in 2009 in Shanshan County in Xinjiang, where over a thousand ancient freshwater turtles apparently had died after the last water hole in an area dried out during a major drought.
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