lavarackorum: after Jim and Sue Lavarack, discoverers of the fossil from which this species was described.
Nicholson River drainage area, Queensland and Northern Territory.
A Living Fossil. Originally described from Pleistocene fossil material from Riversleigh in Queensland.
Author(s): Thomson, S.A., White, A. & Georges, A.
Post-cranial osteological characters can be used to diagnose Australian short-necked chelid turtles to genus. Morphological examination of the Pleistocene fossil Emydura lavarackorum, from Riversleigh, shows that it is aligned with the genus Elseya not Emydura and should be referred to as Elseya lavarackorum (White & Archer, 1994). Furthermore, the fossil specimen is not distinguishable from an undescribed extant form of Elseya from the Nicholson drainage, with which it shares one unique feature so this name should apply also to this extant form, identified to date only from electrophoretic data. It is Australia's first living fossil turtle, an extant population of a Pleistocene taxon.
Elseya lavarackorum at the Australian Reptile Online Database. Last updated 2015-10-20 15:42:08.
Retrieved from http://arod.com.au/arod/?species=Elseya+lavarackorum on the 23rd of April, 2019.