Asmodochelys parhami, a new fossil marine turtle from the Campanian Demopolis Chalk and the stratigraphic congruence of competing marine turtle phylogenies

Resolving the phylogeny of sea turtles is uniquely challenging given the high potential for the unification of convergent lineages due to systematic homoplasy. Equivocal reconstructions of marine turtle evolution subsequently inhibit efforts to establish fossil calibrations for molecular divergence estimates and prevent the accurate reconciliation of biogeographic or palaeoclimatic data with phylogenetic hypotheses. Here we describe a new genus and species of marine turtle, Asmodochelys parhami, from the Upper Campanian Demopolis Chalk of Alabama and Mississippi, USA represented by three partial shells. Phylogenetic analysis shows that A. parhami belongs to the ctenochelyids, an extinct group that shares characteristics with both pan-chelonioids and pan-cheloniids. In addition to supporting Ctenochelyidae as a sister taxon of Chelonioidea, our analysis places Protostegidae outside of the Chelonioidea crown group and recovers Allopleuron hofmanni as a stem dermochelyid. Gap excess ratio (GER) results indicate a strong stratigraphic congruence of our phylogenetic hypothesis; however, the highest GER value is associated with the phylogenetic hypothesis of marine turtles which excludes Protostegidae from the Cryptodira crown group. Ancestral range estimations derived from our phylogeny imply a European or North American origin of Chelonioidea in the middle-to-late Campanian, approximately 20 Myr earlier than current molecular divergence studies suggest.