Chinese soft-shelled turtle Pelodiscus sinensis has been an important aquaculture species in Southeast Asian countries. To breed a new variety of soft-shelled turtle with excellent properties and to evaluate the effect of hybridization of two turtle strains with a highly different trait phenotype, inheritance, microsatellite loci, and transcriptome analysis were studied in the hybrid turtles an...

The origin of the turtle shell over 200 million years ago greatly modified the amniote body plan, and the morphological plasticity of the shell has promoted the adaptive radiation of turtles. The shell, comprising a dorsal carapace and a ventral plastron, is a layered structure formed by basal endochondral axial skeletal elements (ribs, vertebrae) and plates of bone, which are overlain by kerat...

Exposure to sea turtles may be increasing with expanding tourism, although reports of problems arising from interaction with free-living animals appear of negligible human health and safety concern. Exposure both to wild-caught and captive-housed sea turtles, including consumption of turtle products, raises several health concerns for the public, including: microbiological (bacteria, viruses, p...

Normal developmental staging tables often undergo expansion and enhancement in response to advancing research paradigms and technologies. The Painted Turtle, Chrysemys picta, has long been a preferred reference taxon for comparative embryology and recently became the first turtle species to feature a sequenced genome. However, modern descriptive studies on embryogenesis are lacking and an earli...

Sea turtle nesting presents a potential pathway to subsidize nutrient-poor dune ecosystems, which provide the nesting habitat for sea turtles. To assess whether this positive feedback between dune plants and turtle nests exists, we measured N concentration and delta15N values in dune soils, leaves from a common dune plant (sea oats [Uniola paniculata]), and addled eggs of loggerhead (Caretta ca...

Loggerhead turtle is an endangered sea turtle species with a migratory lifestyle and worldwide distribution, experiencing markedly different habitats throughout its lifetime. Environmental conditions, especially food availability and temperature, constrain the acquisition and the use of available energy, thus affecting physiological processes such as growth, maturation, and reproduction. These ...

Turtles are more than just animals with shells. They have important jobs in nature, eating and being eaten by other living things. Tropical Asia is a biodiversity hotspot for turtles—more than one quarter of all turtle species on Earth are found here. Some sad news is that turtles are going extinct because of humans hunting the turtles and destroying their habitats. This situation has been name...

This protocol describes how to incubate painted turtle eggs and collect embryos for gene expression analysis. The same basic protocol can be used to incubate eggs and collect embryos from other turtle species by modifying the incubation temperature to suit the particular developmental needs of each species.

Specimens of the turtle barnacle Cylindrolepas sinica Ren, 1980 were collected from sea turtles in Japanese waters. The specimens were hexagonal in shape and were found burrowing into the sea turtle plastron. Specimens were dissected and the hard and soft parts were compared with the original description.

The Peirópolis paleontological site (Late Cretaceous, Maastrichtian) in Minas Gerais State, Brazil yielded an important assemblage of fossil vertebrates. The typical occurrence of South American widespread taxa in Peirópolis is important for correlation between the Brazilian Bauru Basin and Argentinean Late Cretaceous basins. The fishes, turtles, anuran, crocodilians and dinosaurs known from Pe...