Imagine that your body is 10 times the size of your limbs. Each of your four legs are short, thick, round and tipped with long narrow claws. Your body is also your home that you carry around with you ...

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 ...

When Ann Berry Somers was 7 years old and growing up in North Carolina, she encountered a box turtle on a path. She picked up the small reptile and looked into its eyes. Instead of retreating into its ...

In cartoons, when a turtle is spooked, it retreats into and closes up its shell. While used for comic effect, this imagery is based in fact — although not all turtles are capable of this protective ...

Arkansas is home to 16 turtle species. Only two, the three-toed box turtle and the ornate box turtle, are land dwellers. Box turtles are the only turtles in North America with a flexible hinge on ...

As a budding naturalist growing up in the concrete-heavy environs of Boston, I would regularly thumb through my family’s collection of nature books and daydream about the creatures within. One species ...