Chelus is a genus of large freshwater turtles found in tropical South America. Formerly considered to be a monotypic genus, it now consists of two extant species after Chelus orinocensis was identified in 2020 from a genetic analysis.
Chelus is a genus of large freshwater turtles found in tropical South America. Formerly considered to be a monotypic genus, it now consists of two extant species after Chelus orinocensis was identified in 2020 from a genetic analysis.
== Evolution == Fossils of the extinct †C. colombianus have been found in Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, including a skull dating to the early Miocene (~ 16 m.y.) of the Castilletes Formation, Cocinetas Basin, in Colombia. The fossil shows that the skull morphology of Chelus has been almost unchanged since the Miocene.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).