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“The shell evolved on land.
We are already pretty confident of the remarkable fact that the turtles accomplished an evolutionary doubling back to the land: an early marquee of land ‘tortoises’ went back to the watery environment of their even earlier fish ancestors, became sea turtles, then returned to the land yet again, as a new incarnation of land tortoises, the Testudinidae. That we know, or are nearly certain of. But now we are facing the up to the additional suggestion that this doubling back happened twice! Not just to spawn the modern tortoises, but much longer ago, to give rise to Proganochelys and Palaeochersis in the Triassic.
Can there be another animal for which the genetic book of the dead is such a palimpsest of multiple evolutionary U-turns?”
– Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, pp.179-80
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