A fossil belonging to a gastropod that lived along the shores of the Tethys Sea 66 million years ago has been discovered at an archaeological site in Ankara, Türkiye’s Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said.
The fossil was unearthed during excavations at Kulhoyuk in the Oyaca neighbourhood of Ankara’s Golbasi district.
Ersoy said on social media on Monday that the specimen was believed to date from the final phases of the Tethys Sea, a prehistoric body of water that once covered parts of what is now central Anatolia.
Researchers are examining whether residents of Kulhoyuk found the fossil elsewhere and deliberately brought it to the settlement thousands of years ago.
The possibility could offer new insights into how the object reached the site and what significance it may have held for its inhabitants.
Gastropods are a class of molluscs that includes snails and slugs.
Ancient settlement
Kulhoyuk is a roughly 5,000-year-old settlement associated with the Hattian and Hittite civilisations. The fossilised creature therefore did not live alongside the settlement’s inhabitants.
The discovery follows the identification of what archaeologists described as the earliest-known seed remains of Ankara’s distinctive “Sevgi Cicegi”, or Love Flower, inside a 4,000-year-old Hittite vessel at the same site.
Excavations at Kulhoyuk have been ongoing since 2021 under a long-term archaeological programme backed by the Turkish presidency.
The work is led by Associate Professor Derya Yilmaz Tekin on behalf of Ankara University and the Culture and Tourism Ministry.
Ersoy said excavations would continue to shed light on Kulhoyuk’s history through further discoveries.
