Contents

Turtles (Testudines) form a monophyletic group with a highly distinctive body plan. The taxonomy and phylogeny of turtles are still under discussion, at least for some clades. Whereas in most previous studies, only a few species or genera were con-sidered, we here use an extensive compilation of DNA se-quences from nuclear and mitochondrial genes for more than two thirds of the total number of turtle species to infer a large phylogeny for this taxon. Our results enable us to discuss pre-vious hypotheses on species phylogeny or taxonomy. We are thus able to discriminate between competing hypotheses and to suggest taxonomical modifications. Finally, we pinpoint the remaining ambiguities for this phylogeny and the species for which new sequences should be obtained to improve phyloge