The box turtles clean up nicely
April 13, 2021
Here’s Easty dirty, with a dull-looking shell and a pretty serious ‘tub ring’ of hard-water stains around the crown of her carapace. This shot is a few years old, but she looks about the same now when she’s filthy. But here’s how she cleans up:
On Saturday I gave her a good soak in some warm distilled water and scrubbed her shell with a toothbrush. She shined up beautifully. I should have tried shooting a video, because the keratinous scutes on her shell are a bit translucent, and when full sunlight hits them they take on a depth and luster that I had not previously appreciated (heh).
I shot some reference images in the cardinal directions. If you need dorsal, lateral, or ventral views of an adult female Three-toed box turtle, Terrapene carolina triunguis, it’s your lucky day.
The lateral view is interesting, because you can clearly see the joint between the two halves of her plastron, both of which can raise like drawbridges to completely seal her behind an impenetrable wall of bone and keratin. You can also tell that her posterior plastron is gently convex, which is a female trait. As in many other turtles, male box turtles tend to have at least a gently concave posterior plastron, to help them stay on top of the females during mating.
And a ventral view, giving a good look at her plastron. Note her tiny, tiny tail, with the swelling for the vent just visible in the shadow of the plastron, about even with the edge of the carapace — that’s another female trait, whereas males have longer tails and a more distal vent for mating. You can also see yellow lines cutting across some of the scutes of her plastron — those are the outlines of her plastral bones showing through the overlying keratin. As in carapace, the keratinous scutes overlap the edges of the bones to form a sort of biological plywood. A lot of the growth lines have been worn off of her plastron, which is totally normal, but for the most part you can tell where the growth centers were originally located.
I also gave baby turtle a proper bath, with supervision. Baby box turtles can swim just fine, but if the water is inconveniently deep they can sometimes get flipped over on their backs, be unable to right themselves, and drown. She really did not like not having something to haul out on, so I put in the black jar lid you see in the photo. This particular pic is overexposed, which was a happy accident, because now you can see that the apparently dark and featureless areas of her shell and head are in fact very intricately patterned (compare to her dry photo at the top of this post). I’m really looking forward to seeing how her colors come in over the next few years.
And here’s her plastron. Baby turtle is a different subspecies from Easty — she’s a true Eastern box turtle, Terrapene carolina carolina — so she should have stronger patterns on both her carapace and her plastron when she gets bigger. Her head my also be more vibrantly colored, although Easty is no slouch in that department.
I put the two of them next to each other for a very closely-supervised comparison shot. I had been worried that Easty might have a go at baby turtle, but actually the opposite was true. The wee monster frankly terrorized Easty by nipping at her toes –and this was after eating two small slugs from the back yard — so I brought that experiment to a swift end, and got nipped on the finger for my trouble. I happened to be filming when baby turtle nipped Easty’s toe and my finger, and I will try to get those videos cleaned up and posted soon. Watch this space.
Your daily moment of d’awww: baby box turtle edition
April 10, 2021
Click to embiggen. Trust me on this.
What I think of as our phylogenetically-extended nuclear family grew by one this week: we got a baby box turtle. We got her from a local hobbyist, who hatched her last summer. We haven’t named her yet, so for now she’s just Baby Tiny Turtle. Unlike Easty, who is the three-toed subspecies, Terrapene carolina triunguis, baby turtle is an Eastern box turtle sensu stricto, Terrapene carolina carolina, so she might end up being quite colorful (f’rinstance). She already has pretty complex patterns of lines and spots on the sides and top of her head and on her beak, but she’s so small that you can’t really see them unless you take a photo and zoom in.
(Aside: how do we know she’s a she and not a he? Personally I’d be lost, but the guy who hatched her says that at this age he can sex the babies correctly about 80% of the time, based on the position of the cloaca — it’s farther from the base of the tail in males. If she turns out to be a he, we’ll love him just the same, we’ll just keep him away from Easty.)
Speaking of her size, here’s an obligatory random-objects-for-scale photo. Baby turtle was closer in size to that US quarter when she hatched. You can tell that she’s grown a bit already because each scute on her shell has a outer rim of smooth new keratin. It’s a bit bittersweet, because I want her to grow big and strong and healthy, but I will miss the tiny turtle days when she is bigger.
If you just want to die of cuteness, watch this video of her trying to eat some banana. She got it all down eventually, but with a little more adventure than either of us expected. If you turn up the volume, you can hear me talking her through it. That was entirely for my benefit, because I’m a big ole softy who talks to animals a lot, and she got through just fine on her own.
Full bulletins as events warrant.
Henry and Cheeto
This past summer, I got into a Facebook conversation with Steve Kary about turtles and tortoises. He was posting photos of Henry, his Russian tortoise (Agrionemys horsfieldii, formerly Testudo horsfieldii), and I was struck by how not-big Henry is. I am not a tortoise expert and what little direct experience I have is with desert tortoises and the big-to-giant species like Sulcatas and the Galapagos and Aldabra giant tortoises. I know the popular pet species like Greek and Russian tortoises and the small African species much less well. Offhand, Henry looked about as big as our three-toed box turtle, Easty (Terrapene carolina triunguis), so I asked Steve if he’d mind posting a photo with a scale bar. This is what Steve sent:
Clockwise from the top we have an ink pen, a 75-million-year-old caudal centrum of a crocodile, a bottle cap, a Nebulon-B frigate from Star Wars Armada, a screwdriver, a nail clipper, a small bottle of Tylenol, and a coin. Oh, and a DVD of an awesome movie.
Naturally, I felt compelled to respond in kind:
Here we have Easty with a similarly eclectic selection of small objects. Again from the top: a rat skull in a plastic bottle, a bottle cap, a d20, a small Altoids tin, an ink pen, a nail clipper, a small metal toy from China, and a nickel. Oh, and a DVD of an awesome movie. Yes, Easty is investigating the d20 as a possible food item. She tried to bite it, but since it’s bigger in diameter than her head, all she achieved was to send it shooting across the floor when her beak slammed shut on one of the vertices.
Here I’ve scaled the two photos to the same size. Henry is definitely wider than Easty, and he has a bigger head and chunkier-looking limbs. In fact, having spent most of my life around box turtles, that’s always my thought when I see a small tortoise: “How do they get so much critter into such a small shell?” It may have to do with space packing. Box turtles have to be able to pull everything in all the way so they can raise the drawbridge, as it were, and use their hinged plastron to close everything up tight (hence the name). Most tortoises lack hinged shells and use the tough scales on their legs and feet to complete the defensive perimeter between carapace and plastron. The limbs don’t have to pull all the way in, so they can be a little bigger.
Anyway, if you’d like to join in this pursuit–photographing turtles with collections of random objects–let me know in the comments. You can post your photos there, or I can add them to the body of the post.
Other turtle posts:
The time my turtle munched on a rat skull
February 12, 2019
Darren covered this briefly on the Scientific American version of Tetrapod Zoology, but the photos seem to have gone down and who knows how much longer any of that stuff will be up. Plus, he had other things to discuss, so the story has never been told in its entirety. This happened back in April, 2014. Here’s the full writeup I sent to Darren and Mike about it back when:
This happened Sunday afternoon and I thought you’d be interested. London and I let our box turtle, Easty (Terrapene carolina triunguis), crawl around the front yard on sunny days — with supervision, of course. She loves to dig around the edge of the sidewalk and flower bed and eat wood lice, worms, and whatever else comes her way. Sunday we saw her biting this biggish thing that from a distance looked like crumpled up paper. She was really going at it, so I got close to see what she was munching on. It was the head of a rat that our cat, Moe, had killed last week. Easty was snapping off bits of the braincase and eating them.
I had read of turtles scavenging carcasses for minerals but this was the first time I had observed it myself. She kept at it for about 20 minutes, until all of the thin, easily broken parts of the braincase were gone. She didn’t attempt to eat any of the facial skeleton or basicranium. Once she was done, she was done — I tossed the skull in front of her a couple of times and she would stop to smell it, but then walk past it, or even over it on one occasion.
So, there you have it, turtle eats part of rat skull. In keeping with my resolution to blog more about turtles, I’ll try to get some video of Easty feeding later this year. Right now she’s hibernating in a plastic tub on the bottom shelf of our refrigerator, so the hot turtle-feeding action will have to wait. Watch this space!
P.S. The gray ring on Easty’s shell in these photos is a sort of bathtub ring, from soaking in her water dish with just the top of her shell exposed, which she does for about six hours a day when she’s not hibernating. For pictures of Easty with a cleaner shell, please see the previous post. She really is a beautiful turtle.
Bone cancer in a Triassic stem turtle
February 7, 2019
Cool new paper out today by Yara Haridy and colleagues, describing the oldest known osteosarcoma in the vertebrate fossil record. The growth in question is on the proximal femur of the Triassic stem turtle Pappochelys.
Brian Engh did his usual amazing job illustrating this pervert turtle with no shell and a weird growth on its butt.
I don’t have a ton more to say about the paper, it’s short and sweet. I got to meet Yara in person at SVP last fall and learn about her research, and there is going to a LOT more weird stuff coming down the pike. She is after some really fundamental questions about where bone comes from, how it develops in the first place, and how it remodels and heals. Get ready to see some crazy jacked-up bones from other basal amniotes in the next few years, including some vertebrae that are so horked that Yara and I spent some time discussing which end was which.
On a probably inevitable and purely selfish personal note, I don’t blog nearly enough about turtles. I like turtles. Which, if you’re going to say, you gotta say like this kid:
In fact, I love turtles, and if there were no sauropods, I’d probably be working on turtles. Other people show you pictures of their cats, I’m going to show you pictures of my turtle, Easty. She’s a female three-toed box turtle, Terrapene carolina triunguis.
Here she is closing in on an unlucky roly-poly (or pill bug, if you prefer).
Having a close encounter with our cat Berkeley last summer. I think Easty kinda blew Berkeley’s mind. She’s been around our other cat, Moe, for years, so she’s completely unfazed by cats. But Berkeley is a SoCal kitty who showed up on our doorstep starving and yowling when he was about eight weeks old, so this was his first encounter with a turtle.
Berkeley batted at Easty’s shell a couple of times and then spent about half an hour having a visible existential crisis. Here was a small creature that he couldn’t frighten and couldn’t move, which was not the least bit afraid of him and either ignored him or treated him like an obstacle. Watching them interact — or rather, watching Easty act and Berkeley react — was solid entertainment for most of the afternoon.
Why have I hijacked this post to yap about my turtle? Primarily because up until now I’ve had a hard time visualizing a stem turtle. Turtles are so much their own thing, and I’ve been so interested in them for virtually my entire life, that imagining an animal that was only partly a turtle was very difficult for me. The thing I like most about Brian’s art of the tumorous Pappochelys is that it reads convincingly turtle-ish to me, especially the neck and head:
So congratulations to Yara and her coauthors for a nice writeup of a very cool find, and to Brian for another vibrant piece of paleoart. Triassic turtles sometimes had cancer on their butts. Tell the world!
Since I’ve already blown the weekly schedule here in the new year, maybe my SV-POW! resolution for 2019 will be to blog more about turtles. I’m gonna do it anyway, might as well make it a resolution so I can feel like I’m keeping up with something. Watch this space.
Reference
Exploded turtle skulls are cool, but what about exploding the entire turtle? (Not that way.) Folks at the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien roll hard. Or did – I assume these exhibits are old. Thankfully no museum studies doofus has insisted they be taken down and replaced with an interactive 3D display on what it feels like to be a sea turtle. Kudos to the current management for keeping the natural history museum filled with natural history.
I didn’t get back far enough from them to photograph all of the labels, mostly because I had like 90 minutes to jet through roughly 13,792 halls of amazing things. But this one is a loggerhead, Caretta caretta. Identifying the others is left as an exercise for the reader.
Or better yet, make your own, if you can procure a dead turtle.
Exploded turtles of the Academy of Natural Sciences
April 29, 2018
Saw this gem back in the herpetology collections at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and thought, “Someone up and Beauchened a turtle head.” (My inner monologue is a tennis match between an arch language pedant and an unreconstructed hick with a penchant for folksy archaisms.)
What a sweet mount – there should be one of these for every critter in the museum. There should be a Hall of Exploded Skulls, and a Curator of Exploded Skulls. Would that be too much, or not enough? Both hypotheses remain untested. Someone should fix that.
Many, many thanks to Ted Daeschler for showing me all the awesome stuff at the Academy of Natural Sciences – or, if not all, as much as we could cram into two hours.
I floated this idea on Fist Full of Podcasts, and Andrew Stuck gave it a shout-out in the comments, so I’m promoting it to a post.
The idea, briefly, is that sauropods grew fast and had enormous energy demands and even though horsetails and pine needles are surprisingly nutritious (Hummel et al. 2008), they probably suck to eat all the time. Extant herbivores are notoriously carnivorous when no-one is looking, and it’s silly to assume that extinct ones were any different. It seems likely that a big, hungry sauropod, gifted by natural selection with more selfish opportunism than compassion, would probably have viewed a turtle as a quick shot of protein and calcium, and a welcome hors d’oeuvre before stripping yet another conifer or tree fern. Furthermore, said sauropod would have been well-equipped to render the unfortunate chelonian into bite-size chunks, as shown above. The first time might even have been accidental. (Yeah, sure, Shunosaurus, I believe you. [rolls eyes])
Given that sauropods and turtles coexisted over most of the globe for most of the Mesozoic, I’ll bet this happened all the time. I don’t know how to falsify that,* but how could it not have? You’d have to assume that sauropods didn’t run into turtles, or that their mercy outweighed their curiosity and hunger. That’s even more bonkers than turtle nachos.** As Sherlock Holmes almost said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains – no matter how stupid/awesome – was probably done by sauropods.”
* “Oh, you found a boatload of turtle shell pieces at your fossil site? How tantalizingly unprecedented – please tell me more!” said no-one ever. Seriously, everyone who works on stuff younger than the Early Jurassic seems to bitch about all of the turtle frags they find, whether they’re looking for Apatosaurus or Australopithecus.
** Not to be all navel-gazey, but that is conservatively the greatest sentence I have ever written.
In conclusion, sauropods stomped on turtles and ate them, because duh. Fight me.
Further Reading
For more sauropods stomping, see:
- Genesis of an instant palaeo-art classic
- Sauropods stomping theropods: a much neglected theme in palaeo-art
- Sauropods stomping theropods, redux
- Greatest. Palaeoart. Ever.
- Brian Engh: Stomp time!
- Sauropods stomping theropods: Bryan Riolo’s Chaos Gigantes
- Greatest. Video. Ever. Starring sauropod-on-theropod violence!
And for sauropods not eating, but gettin’ et:
- Oblivious sauropods being eaten
- Oblivious sauropods being eaten, part 2: Bakker’s snoozing brontosaur
Reference
Help me! How can I deflesh a tortoise?
March 22, 2016
I’ve been lucky enough to acquire another beautiful specimen. It arrived in a box (though not from Amazon, despite what the box itself might suggest):
What’s inside?
Can it be? It is!
Now I’ve wanted a tortoise for a long time, because they are (Darren will back me up here) the freakiest of all tetrapods. Their scapulae and coracoids have somehow migrated inside their rib-cages (which bear the shell), and their dorsal vertebrae are fused to the shell all along its upper midline. Just ridiculous. Look, this is what I’m talking about. Compare with the much saner approach that armadillos use to having a shell.
Here’s my baby in left anterodorsolateral view:
And in right posteodorsolateral:
Can anyone tell me what species I have here?
Here he is (or she?) upside down, in left posteroventolateral view.
Come to think of it, can anyone tell me the sex of my specimen?
Here he or she is in anterior view, looking very stern.
The problem is — and I can’t quite believe this never occurred to me until I had a tortoise of my own — how on earth do you deflesh such a creature? I have no idea (and obviously no experience). Any hints?
Roadside dinos of Yermo, California
April 27, 2015
A couple of weekends ago, London and I went camping and stargazing at Afton Canyon, a nice dark spot about 40 miles east of Barstow. On the way home, we took the exit off I-15 at Ghost Town Road, initially because we wanted to visit the old Calico Ghost Town. But then we saw big metal dinosaurs south of the highway, and that’s how we came to Peggy Sue’s Diner and in particular the Diner-saur Park.
The Diner-saur Park is out behind the diner and admission is free. There are pools with red-eared sliders, paved walkways, grass, trees, a small gift shop, and dinosaurs. Here’s a Spinosaurus – curiously popular in the Mojave Desert, those spinosaurs.
Ornithischians are represented by two stegosaurs, this big metal one and a smaller concrete one under a tree.
The turtles are entertaining. They paddle around placidly and crawl out to bask on the banks of the pools, and on little islands in the centers.
The gift shop is tiny and the selection of paleo paraphernalia is not going to blow away any hard-core dinophiles. But it is not without its charm. And, hey, when you find a dinosaur gift shop in the middle of nowhere, you don’t quibble about size. London got some little plastic turtles and I got some cheap and horribly inaccurate plastic dinosaur skeletons to make a NecroDinoMechaLaser Squad for our Dinosaur Island D&D campaign.
Now, about that sauropod. The identification sign on the side of the gift shop notwithstanding, this is not a Brachiosaurus. With the short forelimbs and big back end, this is clearly a diplodocid. The neck is too skinny for Apatosaurus or the newly-resurrected Brontosaurus, and too long for Diplodocus. I lean toward Barosaurus, although I noticed in going back through these photos that with the mostly-straight, roughly-45-degree-angle neck, it is doing a good impression of the Supersaurus from my 2012 dinosaur nerve paper. Compare this:
to this:
If I had noticed it sooner, I would have maneuvered for a better, more comparable shot.
Guess I’ll just have to go back.
Reference
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
