The Most Romantic Story About Fossilized 47-Million-Year-Old Turtles That You Will Ever Read

“Millions of animals live and die every year and many enter the fossil record through serendipitous circumstances, but there really is no reason to enter the fossil record while you are mating. After all, the chances of both partners dying at the same time is highly unlikely and the chances of both partners being preserved afterwards even less likely. The Messel turtles are therefore the only vertebrate fossils known to have died while in the process of mating and this only happened because of the highly unusual circumstances of the lake in which they lived.”
 — Those of us still a little sad about Bibi and Poldi, the 115-year-old tortoise couple who broke up last week in Austria, can take heart in University of Tubingen researcher Walter Joyce’s description of fossils found in the Messel Pit Fossil Site between Darmstadt and Frankfurt, Germany. Apparently, the turtles had fallen into a blissful, sort-of-Tantric trance-like state while they doing sex in a lake and didn’t notice themselves drifting into poisonous water. It’s like a “Lovers’ Leap” thing. Or Romeo and Juliet.