Cavemen hunted turtles — but not for food, new research suggests. Scientists say that shells of reptiles caught by children may have been used as ladles or digging devices by early humans over 100,000 ...

Sometimes animated turtles seem to live inside their shells like it’s a tiny home. They may even hop out of the shell and run around. That’s funny in cartoons and games, but my friend Ryan Wagner told ...

How smushed shells could help to resolve paleontological mysteries. By Asher Elbein You never know where a bit of unusual scientific research is going to lead. Consider a 2012 study about turtle ...

Wildlife biologist Brittany Clemans explains how the NOAA uses shell etchings to track turtle migration and how fellow turtle ...

It's a long-held idea that turtles can tuck their heads into their shells when threatened. But is it true? And is this protective trick why turtles the world over have shells today? The answer is that ...

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 ...

When we picture sea turtles in the wild, it's easy to envision them as armored warriors—their hard, resilient shells serving as near-impenetrable shields against oceanic threats like sharks. These ...

Researchers at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School have developed a method to read the chemical layers inside sea turtle shells like a biological stopwatch, reconstructing years of an animal’s ...

The shells of chelonians—think turtles, tortoises, and sea turtles—grow in layers, keeping a time-stamped record of environmental conditions. Uranium has shown up in the layers of turtles’ and ...