Cartoons often suggest turtles wear shells like removable armor. Those stories show turtles stepping out, swapping shells, or treating them like clothing. Biology disagrees. A turtle shell is not an ...

The turtle's shell provides it with a formidable defence and one that is unique in the animal world. No other animal has a structure quite like it, and the bizarre nature of the turtle's anatomy also ...

Sea turtles are the oceans’ wanderers. They live for up to a hundred years, and meander hundreds of thousands of miles. The ...

Techniques developed to study the distant past—from dating ancient artifacts to reconstructing climate records in ice cores—are now being repurposed to help us better understand the lives of modern ...

Every young boy has spent at least one afternoon digging a hole in the ground looking for some kind of treasure. An eight-year-old from South Africa was doing just that when he unearthed a turtle ...

Sea turtle shells record life history layer by layer over many years, clearly revealing diet, stress, movement, and ocean changes.

Francis Horne, a biologist who studies shell formation at Texas State University, offers this answer. The exoskeletons of snails and clams, or their shells in common parlance, differ from the ...