Scientists believe a 13-million-year-old snapping turtle fossil on display at the museum and art gallery of the northern territory is a previously unknown species. It's thought the giant carnivorous snapping turtle lived in central Australia lurking in the shallow waters of creeks and rivers
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00:00It started with a hunch that there was something unusual about a display at the Northern Territories
00:08Museum and Art Gallery.
00:09I'd had my eye on this particular fossil but it was on display and I had many other jobs
00:16to be getting on with.
00:18Another expert suggested Dr Yates take another look and they found their specimen's shell
00:23had a completely unique feature.
00:25We've had a peculiar thick shape with an extra little process sticking down that basically
00:35told us that it wasn't like anything that had been found before.
00:39Now named Elsea mudbara, the large carnivorous turtle lived at the northern edge of the Tanami
00:45Desert 13 million years ago, when the landscape was completely different.
00:50Back then we would have had forests and in those forests would have lived giant birds,
00:56big tall three metre flightless birds like Dremornis, large browsing marsupials, quadrupedal
01:03marsupials related to wombats.
01:06Dr Yates is part of a dedicated team of scientists who've unearthed new species at fossil dig
01:12sites around Central Australia which are housed among a massive collection of animal specimens
01:17underneath the museum.
01:19We have individual specimens in our collection but we also have lots of jars, drums, vats
01:25of things.
01:26So at Magnet we've got just over 830,000 lots in terms of individual animals, that's millions.
01:34A collection that likely includes other unknown animals from the distant past.
01:40For those things that have been there for decades perhaps and we haven't looked at or
01:43we don't know much about that kind of taxa or that type of animal, there could be hundreds
01:48of undiscovered species in museums around the world including ours.
01:51Discovering Australia's prehistoric wildlife.