Warkalania is an extinct genus of Australian meiolaniid turtle from the Oligocene or early Miocene of Riversleigh, Queensland. While other meiolaniids are known for their elaborate headcrests or long horns, Warkalania only possesses very short horns that form a somewhat continuous ridge across the back of the head. The only known species of this genus, Warkalania carinaminor, is the oldest named meiolaniid turtle of Australia.
Warkalania is an extinct genus of Australian meiolaniid turtle from the Oligocene or early Miocene of Riversleigh, Queensland. While other meiolaniids are known for their elaborate headcrests or long horns, Warkalania only possesses very short horns that form a somewhat continuous ridge across the back of the head. The only known species of this genus, Warkalania carinaminor, is the oldest named meiolaniid turtle of Australia.
==History and naming== Although the presence of meiolaniids in the Riversleigh fauna had been known on the basis of fragmentary remains since at least 1987, the first diagnostic remains were discovered by Neville Pledge in the form of a partial skull from strata dating to the late Oligocene to early Miocene. These remains were described by Eugene S. Gaffney, Michael Archer and Arthur White as a new genus of meiolaniid turtle they named Warkalania carinaminor. The holotype is specimen QMF 22649, a right squamosal bone including the tympanic cavity and various scales of that area, and was discovered at the Pancake Site in Queensland. Additional material has also been reported, such as QMF 22650, a left squamosal that may have belonged to the same individual as the type specimen. The other referred specimens include various skull bones including the parietals, a quadrate bone and the squamosal of at least one other turtle.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).