The Truth About Turtles
Tip! The Marinelife Center has a wide variety of activities for all ages. Children will enjoy the saltwater touch tanks, and there are tours you can take to watch the of the area in their natural habitat.
It can be hard to talk about properly in North America because what we refer to as is not really what a turtle is. While traditionally we use the word to describe those shelled reptiles that live by the water it really refers to any shelled reptile there is. In this part of the world we generally refer to the land as tortoises.
So though we separate the species in our minds by assigning different words, they are really all one. These are little guys that are born with a shell. It is a bony leathery shell that grows with them and is pretty much carried with them for life.
Turtles are resilient creatures and perhaps one of the best examples of evolved life on Earth. This is because they have survived longer than most any other species that has come along. The earliest known lived so long ago that dinosaurs were walking the earth with them, but when the disaster struck to wipe out the dinosaurs the managed to survive. They also survived another life altering disaster a few million years later.
Now these guys back then were so well evolved, that is to say they were such a perfect specimen of what they should be, that the oldest fossils we know of are not much different than the ones that roam around today. That means that in the past millions of years have not changed, and have not had to change, all that much in order to survive. Compare that with humans who have evolved dramatically from where we were just a million years ago.
Tip! The African Mud Turtle was recently imported in a large number. These types of turtles, although they are mud turtles, are very much alike the Painted turtles.
These days can be found everywhere. Populated or remote areas, in personal aquariums or you can find some really big and old in any number of zoos.
Van Whitsett has published a number of articles, both online and offline. For more info on turtles, visit: Turtle Pond
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