The box turtle and the painted turtle are both turtles from the family Emydidae. Both painted turtles and box turtles are popular pets across the world. They have a similar appearance, with colorful ...

As a budding naturalist growing up in the concrete-heavy environs of Boston, I would regularly thumb through my family’s ...

The scutes are made of keratin, the same protein found in our fingernails and hair, and give turtle shells their color. Hinged-shell turtles have a split in the plastron, just behind the turtle ...

You wouldn’t normally see the words “turtle” and “lightning-fast” in the same sentence, but common snapping turtles have ...

Turtles have a lower shell, called a plastron, and an upper shell, or carapace. In hard-shelled turtle species, the shells are made up of bony plates that are covered with scale-like “scutes.” The ...

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 ...