Zoological Studies

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