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Vol. 48 No. 6, 2009
Shell Morphology of the Egyptian Tortoise, Testudo kleinmanni
Lortet, 1883, the Osteologically Least-Known Testudo Species
Massimo
Delfino1,2,*, Francesco Chesi2, and Uwe Fritz3
1Paläontologisches
Institut und Museum, Universität Zürich, Karl Schmid-Strasse 4, CH-8006
Zürich, Switzerland
2Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Università di
Firenze, Via G. La Pira 4, I-50121, Firenze, Italy
3Museum of Zoology (Museum für Tierkunde), Senckenberg
Dresden, A. B. Meyer Building, D-01109 Dresden, Germany
Massimo
Delfino, Francesco Chesi, and Uwe Fritz (2009) The present paper
provides the first detailed description of the shell osteology of
Testudo kleinmanni, a small tortoise species that currently occurs only
in a narrow, discontinuous strip along the southeastern Mediterranean
coast, extending from Libya to Israel. Its bony shell differs from the
partially codistributed species T. graeca in characters present on the
nuchal, suprapygal, pygal, epiplastron, entoplastron, hyoplastron, and
xiphiplastron. The other shell elements are very similar in both
species. For such elements, only the smaller adult size of T.
kleinmanni can be used for tentative species identification. Generally,
shell osteology does not reflect the currently accepted sister-group
relationship of T. kleinmanni and T. marginata (the only possible
shared character may be the shape of the pectoro-abdominal sulcus).
Until now, the species has never been identified from palaeontological
assemblages and only very rarely in archaeological settings. The
extreme rarity of fossil and subfossil records could be caused, at
least in part, by the fact that diagnostic osteological characters were
previously unknown.
Key words: Osteology,
Taxonomy, Mediterranean tortoises, Testudo graeca, Testudo marginata.
*Correspondence: E-mail:massimo.delfino@pim.uzh.ch
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