A large non-marine turtle from the Upper Cretaceous of Alabama and a review of North American "Macrobaenids".

The abundant record of marine turtles from the Late Cretaceous of Appalachia contrasts with the relatively poor record of contemporaneous terrestrial and freshwater species. A new taxon from the Santonian-Campanian of Alabama, Appalachemys ebersolei gen. et sp.

, a new fossil marine turtle from the Campanian Demopolis Chalk and the stratigraphic congruence of competing marine turtle phylogenies.

Resolving the phylogeny of sea turtles is uniquely challenging given the high potential for the unification of convergent lineages due to systematic homoplasy. Equivocal reconstructions of marine turtle evolution subsequently inhibit efforts to establish fossil calibrations for molecular divergence estimates and prevent the accurate reconciliation of biogeographic or palaeoclimatic data with phylogenetic hypotheses. Here we describe a new genus and species of marine turtle, , from the Upper Campanian Demopolis Chalk of Alabama and Mississippi, USA represented by three partial shells.