Imagine, 90 million years ago, swimming through a freshwater world in what is now western New Mexico. When your time came, you sank into soft mud like others of your kind, your body slowly buried under layers of earth. You had no way of knowing: your story was only beginning.
Centuries turned to millennia and millennia into ages. As ecosystems rose and fell, your shell hardened into stone. You lay hidden while continents shifted, dinosaurs vanished, and new species emerged — including humans, who would one day uncover you again.
In the 1990s, paleontologists exploring dinosaur‑rich badlands in the Zuni Basin of western New Mexico uncovered a turtle shell fossil. For the first time in millions of years, sunlight touched it again. But its return to the surface was brief. It was packed away, stored in a collection for decades.
In 2023, Arizona State University scientist Brent Adrian examined the fossil closely. What he saw revealed something extraordinary: it wasn’t just another turtle fossil, but an entirely new species. The nearly complete shell, fused and smooth, told the story of the baenid turtles, an ancient group that once thrived in freshwater.
The new species was named Edowa zuniensis, an identity that honors the Zuni people and the land that protected this unique fossil for 90 million years.
Against all odds, the story continues, written into the record of Earth’s deep history and carried forward by the people who rediscovered the Zuni turtle and those who cherished the land it once swam.
This episode of Earth Notes was brought to you in part by Pink Jeep Tours, written by Octavio Alcocer Duran, and produced by KNAU and the Sustainable Communities Program at Northern Arizona University
