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From a north Florida river, about half an inch thick. Based on the lines from the scute margins that are visible I'm guessing this is a partial Hesperotestudo hyoplastron? -Zach

I'm putting out an open call for any collectors who have any reasonably complete tortoise or turtle material from the Peace River (or its tributaries) or even possibly Bone Valley material from the quarries in the area. I'm working with Jason Bourque in the fossil prep lab on the campus of UF here in Gainesville (presently working on an 18 Ma gator skull from the Thomas Farm site). Jason is reassembling some turtle specimens that had been collected in Florida that have been languishing in the collection for decades. He's presently reassembling a giant tortoise plastron collected in the 1980s. He's doing this to gather material for a book project he's working on. Material from the Peace River has largely been ignored for the past 150 years. Decisions made in the 1800s (wrongly) assumed that material from the Peace would be worn and disarticulated isolated finds in lag deposits in the river bottom and would be of little interest to science and so the Peace was left mostly to avocational hunters (good for us) but this left a gap in the scientific record. Several important type specimens have come from the Peace River area--the slider turtle Trachemys euglypha and the giant Galapagos tortoise size Hesperotestudo crassiscutata are two prominent examples. Jason is interested in locating any additional material that is complete enough (and has good collection data) which might provide other good examples of the turtle/tortoise species found in this area of southern Florida. Although it is a bit of a long shot I told Jason I'd inquire here on the forum to see if anybody has such material who wouldn't mind having it looked at by Jason. Let me know if any of you have such material or possibly know folks (off the forum) who might have material that would seem to fit this description. Feel free to contact me my PM if you have any information that might prove useful. Thanks in advance for any efforts in locating any scientifically important specimens for this project. Cheers. -Ken

So I had a chance to visit the Mace Brown museum finally. Absolutely fantastic museum, and the kids loved it. Wonderful variety of fossils and especially local whale / dolphin material. But I did see one fossil that perplexed me. Unfortunately I only got one picture as the kids were running absolutely wild on me.  So I did a double take on this one. Because it's clearly NOT Terrapene sp. or even the same family. Looks like Testudinidae to me. There is a nice paper on Pleistocene turtles and tortoises found at this location - Turtles (Reptilia : Testudines) of the Ardis local fauna late Pleistocene (Rancholabrean) of South Carolina - that cites Hesperotestudo crassiscutata and Gopherus sp. from SC, but I am really thinking neither of those looks right. Maybe this is Hesperotestudo incisa? Any thoughts? Maybe @Boesse would know more about this fossil?

Found this huge chunk of tortoise shell yesterday while scouting a new gravel bar on the Brazos River near Houston. I've found many fragments before, but never anything this large. What got me even more excited was how it seems that it's a mostly complete bone (except for some wear on one of the flat edges that would have been an area where the bone joined another piece of the shell). I tentatively identified it as a peripheral from the edge of the shell from a Hesperotestudo sp., since they seem to be the only species of giant tortoise that lived in Texas during the Pleistocene. Can anyone with better references than me confirm or deny this? Thanks for looking!

So I took the similar topic of another fossil ID on this site, but wanted to make sure it was the same thing. I found this 30 miles inland off of the East coast of SC, USA where I usually find megs, angustiden teeth as well as hemipristis teeth. But I have only seen similar things pulled out of Peace river in FL. Is this part of a Hesperotestudo?? Or could it be gator. One more picture

This is another reason I love my wife! She found this digging in the high water in bone valley yesterday. This thing is a whopping 60mm X 28mm wide! That's 2 3/8 inches long... We probably have 200 spurs, but none even close to this guy. Does anybody have a bigger one? Love to see it! Please!