Episode 244 - Sea Turtles

The Common Descent Podcast

Common Descent

Science, Education, Natural Sciences, Earth Sciences, Science:natural Sciences

4.8 • 896 Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2026

⏱️ 148 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Most modern turtles are pretty good in the water, but only some are truly ocean-dwellers. This episode, we explore the unique and diverse lifestyles and anatomy of modern sea turtles, then we take a tour of turtles through time, visiting the surprising number of ancient lineages that have taken to the seas and the surprising forms some of them have taken. In the news: twisted jaws, early centipedes, Ediacaran microbes, and Neanderthal teeth Time markers:Intro & Announcements: 00:00:00News: 00:04:45Main discussion, Part 1: 00:43:50Main discussion, Part 2: 01:30:10Patron question: 02:14:60 Happy World Turtle Day! https://worldturtleday.org/ Check out our website for this episode’s blog post and more: http://commondescentpodcast.com/ Join us on Patreon to support the podcast and enjoy bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/commondescentpodcast Got a topic you want to hear about? Submit your episode request here: https://commondescentpodcast.com/request-a-topic/ Lots more ways to connect with us: https://linktr.ee/common_descent The Intro and Outro music is “On the Origin of Species” by Protodome. More music like this at http://ocremix.org Musical Interludes are "Professor Umlaut" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Common Descent Podcast.
0:19.0	Hello, Will. Hello, David.
0:21.4	Hello, listeners, and welcome to Common Descent, episode 244.
0:27.3	This episode's topic is sea turtles.
0:30.2	A couple of years ago, in the summer, we did marine crocs, and we did sea snakes.
0:35.2	Now, oh, we've also done a bunch of the other marine reptiles. We did ichthosaurs, we did pletosaurs, we did mosasaurus, sea snakes. Now, we've also done a bunch of the other marine reptiles.
0:38.2	We did ectheosaurs.
0:39.0	We did pleasesosaurs.
0:39.7	We did mosasaurus.
0:40.8	Sea turtles.
0:41.9	We're going to talk about what makes a turtle well suited for living in the ocean.
0:47.7	We'll discuss our modern day species.
0:50.3	And then we will go through a history of sea turtles throughout the fossil record,
0:55.0	an evolutionary history of the multiple times that turtles have done this.
0:59.7	Really interesting fossil record stuff.
1:02.6	They're really good at getting to the ocean.
1:05.1	They're such strange creatures.
1:07.0	We're going to get into it.
1:08.0	It's going to be a lot of fun.
1:09.6	This topic was requested, as all of our episode topics tend to be.
1:15.1	This one by Jackie and Matt.
1:17.8	Thank you both for your request.
	...

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