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Several years ago, Colombian paleontologist Edwin Cadena decided that when he found something unique in Colombia, he would name it Shakira. “She is a person that I admire very much, who has not only been in my life, but in that of numerous colleagues who listen to her when we go into the field, since we started our careers”, also recalls the professor of the Earth System Sciences program at the University of Rosario. And the opportunity has arrived. Not only recording a new species, but a new genus of fossil turtle that inhabited the country 13 million years ago: the Colombian Shakiremys.
A complete skull and jointed shell from one specimen, and only one shell from another, was the only thing found in 2022, in two areas of La Victoria, a population center in the department of Huila, located just above the Tatacoa Desert. There is the La Venta paleontological site, which houses thousands of fossils of animals and plants that populated the so-called middle Miocene, as well as ancestral and now extinct Colombian Shakiremys. It is a landscape that tells what life was like between 13 and 15 million years ago, when the Andes mountain range had not yet finished rising and that area of the country was more like a mosaic of lakes and rivers connected to each other.
The pieces were patiently unearthed, taken to Bogota for a CT scan, and each of their characteristics was compared with data from other species inhabiting the Earth to determine that it was, indeed, a new genus. THE Colombian Shakiremyssays Cadena, it is part of the podocnemhidids, a family of turtles native to Madagascar and what is now northern South America. But, analyzing its characteristics compared to those of both groups, they noticed that it had peculiarities of both groups. “What we found across the fossil record could always be classified: it was closer to those from Madagascar or those from South America. Shakiremys“On the other hand, it’s in the middle,” Cadena says. “It’s not that common for this to happen in the history of turtles,” he adds of the importance of the discovery.
Like the singer, the Shakiremys He was versatile. It was able to adapt to different aquatic environments, such as dark and clear waters. Their diet, they believe, was probably omnivorous. Its story, similarly, is Colombian to the bone. Despite its potential, Tatacoa only began to be judiciously explored about 10 years ago, with the encouragement of the country’s universities, such as El Rosario, La Universidad del Norte and Eafit, and the international Smithsonian institute. This has generated an ecosystem to be able to learn about one’s past. Not only on a scientific level, but among the locals: the people who live there have appropriated the knowledge, they build it.
Brothers Rubén and Andrés Vanegas, for example, became so passionate about fossils from an early age that they are now behind the local initiative of the Tatacoa Natural History Museum, which preserves around 4,000 fossil specimens from La Venta. To them, also the authors of the study on Shakyremis published today in Articles in Paleontology, Jair Díaz, the person who saw the remains of the specimens on his property, called them and warned them that it could be a fossil. The Vanegas went and dug them out and prepared them. “What happened in Tatacoa was the result of raising awareness,” Cadena says. But also community science.
The paleontologist is clear that the name given to the new genus of fossil turtle may generate controversy. In the universe of science, the freedom to name names after whoever describes them is something much debated. There’s a Darien snake named after actor Leonardo DiCaprio and a queen bee that pays homage to Beyoncé. But ornithology has also reported that many birds are named in homage to the naturalists and colonizers who promoted slavery in Africa.
“We believe that naming species after real people is unnecessary and objectively difficult to justify,” a group of scientists said in a comment on Ecology and evolution of nature in 2023. “The Earth’s biodiversity is part of the world’s heritage and should not be trivialized by associating it with a single individual, whatever the value attributed to it”.
Cadena and his men, without denying the controversy, have well-founded intentions. Shakira is unique to Colombia as is the turtle fossil that now bears her name. It is also a scientific communication strategy to bring people closer to a topic that seems distant. Otherwise, chances are you wouldn’t be reading this article, or it wouldn’t have been written.
The singer’s lyrics also wink at paleontology. He explored it and mentions them in a call with América Futura. in the song rulesfrom Laundry Service, the artist sings: “We are branches of the same old tree” (we are all branches of the same old tree). And the best metaphor that still exists to explain evolution is the tree of life. In the iconic Bare feetthe Colombian also says the phrase “you faced a dinosaur”. “And many of the fossils we study had to do that, right?”, recalls the paleontologist: “Facing a dinosaur”.
