At 4.6 Meters Long, Archelon Was The Largest Turtle Ever Known To Have Lived

The Late Cretaceous was a time of ocean giants, with the likes of scarily sharp-toothed mosasaurs and ridiculously long-necked elasmosaurs bigging it up in the seas. But while these might be some of the more famous aquatic reptilian behemoths from this period, they aren’t the only ones. Around 74 million years ago, they were joined by the largest turtle ever to have been documented. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

That turtle is Archelon , and we aren’t overexaggerating when we say this thing was an absolute unit. It measured about 4.6 meters (15 feet) from the tip of its beak to the end of its tail, 5 meters (16.5 feet) from the end of one outstretched front flipper to the other, and weighed more than a whopping 2,