Data from: Preserved collagen reveals species identity in archaeological marine turtle bones from Caribbean and Florida sites

Advancements in molecular science are continually improving our
understanding of marine turtle biology and evolution. However, there are
still considerable gaps in our understanding, such as past marine turtle
distributions, which can benefit from advanced zooarchaeological analyses.
Here we apply collagen fingerprinting to 130 archaeological marine turtle
bone samples up to 2500 years old from the Caribbean and Florida’s Gulf
Coast for faunal identification, finding the vast majority of samples
(88%) to contain preserved collagen despite deposition in the tropics. All
samples can be identified to species-level with the exception of the
Kemp’s ridley (Lepidochelys kempii) and olive ridley (L. olivacea)
turtles, which can be separated to genus level, having diverged from one
another only ~5 million years ago. Additionally, we identify a single
homologous peptide that allows the separation of archaeological green
turtle samples, Chelonia spp., into two distinct groups, which potentially
signifies a difference in genetic stock. The majority of the
archaeological samples are identified as green turtle (Chelonia spp.;
63%), with hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata; 17%) and ridley turtles
(Lepidochelys spp.; 3%) making up smaller proportions of the assemblage.
There were no molecular identifications of the loggerhead turtle (Caretta
caretta) in the assemblage despite 9% of the samples being morphologically
identified as such, highlighting the difficulties in relying on
morphological identifications alone in archaeological remains. Finally, we
present the first marine turtle molecular phylogeny using collagen (I)
amino acid sequences and find our analyses match recent phylogenies based
on nuclear and mitochondrial DNA. Our results highlight the advantage of
using collagen fingerprinting to supplement morphological analyses of
turtle bones and support the usefulness of this technique for assessing
their past distributions across the Caribbean and Florida’s Gulf Coast,
especially in these tropical environments where DNA preservation may be
poor.