Testudinata
taxonomic division in the class of Reptiles
Testudinata is the group of all tetrapods with a true turtle shell. It includes both modern turtles (Testudines) and many of their extinct, shelled relatives (stem-turtles). This excludes Pappochelys, Eorhynchochelys, and Odontochelys, which are placed in earlier-diverging positions within the more inclusive clade Pantestudines.
History
Testudinata was first coined as the group containing turtles by Jacob Theodor Klein in 1760. In 1832–1836, Thomas Bell wrote a book describing the Testudinata, which summarizes all the world's turtles, living and extinct, illustrated by forty plates by Jane S. Bell, James de Carle Sowerby and Edward Lear. It was first defined in the modern sense by Joyce and colleagues in 2004. While the ancestral condition for the clade is thought to be terrestrial, members of the subclade Mesochelydia, which contains almost all known testudinatans from the Jurassic onwards, are thought to be ancestrally aquatic.
Classification
The cladogram below follows an analysis by Jérémy Anquetin in 2012.
“Testudinata” enters the record as taxonomic division in the class of Reptiles. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Testudinata, taxonomic and division can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16114972. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1760, 1832, 1836 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Testudinata” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.