Shell Morphology of the Egyptian Tortoise, Testudo kleinmanni Lortet, 1883, the Osteologically Least-Known Testudo Species

The present paper provides the first detailed description of the shell osteology of Testudo kleinmanni, a small tortoise species that currently occurs only in a narrow, discontinuous strip along the southeastern Mediterranean coast, extending from Libya to Israel. Its bony shell differs from the partially codistributed species T. graeca in characters present on the nuchal, suprapygal, pygal, epiplastron, entoplastron, hyoplastron, and xiphiplastron. The other shell elements are very similar in both species. For such elements, only the smaller adult size of T. kleinmanni can be used for tentative species identification. Generally, shell osteology does not reflect the currently accepted sister-group relationship of T. kleinmanni and T. marginata (the only possible shared character may be the shape of the pectoro-abdominal sulcus). Until now, the species has never been identified from palaeontological assemblages and only very rarely in archaeological settings. The extreme rarity of fossil and subfossil records could be caused, at least in part, by the fact that diagnostic osteological characters were previously unknown.