12 million years ago turtles were warriors.

In the swamps and rivers of northern South America 12 million years ago, some of the largest turtles that ever lived fought epic battles for mates and territory. New fossils unearthed in Colombia and Venezuela reveal that the 1100-kilogram males of the species, Stupendemys geographicus, bore unusual horns on the front of their 2.4-meter-long shells, which they likely used to fight each other and fend off crocodiles more than three times their size. At the same time, a detailed look at the turtles’ gigantic jaws suggest they might not have been the ferocious predators some scientists presumed, but instead ate hard-shelled mollusks and large fruits.

This is the first time such horned remains have been found, even though the species was first described in 1976. At the time, scientists had uncovered only fragments of S. geographicus shells.

But over the past 6 years, paleontologist Edwin Cadena of Del Rosario University and his colleagues uncovered several complete S. geographicus fossils in northern Venezuela and in Colombia’s Tatacoa desert, which for the first time included fragments of a jaw. Those fragments closely matched jaw pieces from fossils in Brazil and Peru that had been assigned to other species. Read the full article.