The biggest turtle of all time
From flipper tip to flipper tip it measured about four metres.
In the sea · Sea reptiles
Archelon
Ruler turtle · AR-kell-on
The largest turtle ever: the size of a small car, with a leathery shell and huge front flippers.
- Size
- About 4.6m long; over 2 tonnes
- Lived
- About 80 to 74 million years ago
- Found in
- South Dakota and Wyoming, USA
Rows after you, slow and steady. Move your pointer and see.
To scale
How big was it?
The bars are drawn to the same scale. On these pages the animals are sized in proportion to each other as far as a screen allows: the giants are shrunk a little and the smallest are enlarged, so that you can see them all.
Good to know
Six things about the archelon
A leathery shell
Its shell was a framework of bony struts covered in thick skin, like a leatherback turtle's today.
A hooked beak
Its sharp, hooked beak could crack shellfish.
A missing flipper
One skeleton has part of a back flipper missing, perhaps bitten off when it was young.
It may have slept on the sea bed
Some scientists think it rested on the bottom, half buried in mud.
Related to today's turtles
Its nearest living relative is the leatherback.
The real thing
Photos of the archelon
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
What it ate
Squid, jellyfish and shellfish.
How we know
The biggest skeleton, found in the 1970s, is in a museum in Vienna.
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