Gerardo Cordero introduces the turtle shell, an evolutionary novelty.

Turtles have been known since the Upper Triassic (210Myr old); however, fossils recording the first steps of turtle evolution are scarce and often fragmentary. As a consequence, one of the main questions is whether living turtles (Testudines) originated during the Late Triassic (210Myr old) or during the Middle to Late Jurassic (ca 160Myr old). The discovery of the new fossil turtle, Condorchel...

Habitat bioaugmentation and introduction of protective microbiota have been proposed as potential conservation strategies to rescue endangered mammals and amphibians from emerging diseases. For both strategies, insight into the microbiomes of the endangered species and their habitats is essential. Here, we sampled nests of the endangered sea turtle species Eretmochelys imbricata that were infec...

We collected movement data for eight rehabilitated and satellite-tagged green sea turtles Chelonia mydas released off the United Arab Emirates between 2005 and 2013. Rehabilitation periods ranged from 96 to 1353 days (mean = 437 ± 399 days). Seven of the eight tagged turtles survived after release; one turtle was killed by what is thought to be a post-release spear gun wound. The majority of tu...

Sea turtles nest on sandy beaches and tend to show high fidelity to specific nesting areas, but, despite this fidelity, the inter-annual variation in nesting numbers may be large. This variation may reflect the fact that turtles do not usually nest in consecutive years. Here, theoretical models are developed in which the interval between successive nesting years (the remigration interval) refle...

The directional responses of turtles to simulated magnetic coordinates of positions in the sea have given insight into the turtles' route-like and map-like behaviour.

*Corresponding author: Mailing address: Kawagoe City Public Health Center, 817-1, Ogaya, Kawagoe-shi, Saitama 350-1104, Japan. E-mail: [email protected] We report here an outbreak of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium infection at a snapping turtle (Suppon) restaurant in Japan. On September 27, 2007, a public health center received a report that a 4-year-old boy had been s...

Oceanic currents are known to broadly shape the dispersal of juvenile sea turtles during their pelagic stage. Accordingly, simple passive drift models are widely used to investigate the distribution at sea of various juvenile sea turtle populations. However, evidence is growing that juveniles do not drift purely passively but also display some swimming activity likely directed towards favorable...