Animals, features and articles | Educational Science

Aug 1, 2014

Tortoises Show Off Smarts by Mastering Touch-Screen Tech

Touch-screen technology has ventured into the world of reptiles. Red-footed tortoises have learned how to use the device in exchange for a strawberry, a new study reports. Researchers taught the tortoises a few touch-screen basics in order to learn about the animals' navigational techniques. The tortoises not only mastered the...

Sep 17, 2014

Amazon Turtles 'Talk' to Their Tots

Brian Horne is coordinator of turtle conservation for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). WCS manages the Bronx Zoo, the New York Aquarium and other sites, in addition to its global conservation work. Horne contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Turtles are popularly perceived as slow,...

Sep 19, 2014

Lonesome No More: George the Giant Tortoise on Public Display in NYC

NEW YORK — With head held high outside of his enormous shell, the giant tortoise proudly looks out from his rock-strewn box at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. Just as in life, the painstakingly preserved reptile appears to extend his neck for a better...

Jan 15, 2015

Sea Turtles Use Earth's Magnetic Field to Find Home

Female sea turtles, known to swim thousands of miles before returning to their birthplace to lay eggs, find their way home by relying on unique magnetic signatures along the coast, a new study finds. For more than 50 years, scientists have been mystified by how sea turtles do this, said...

Feb 26, 2015

Beach Microbes Starving Baby Sea Turtles of Oxygen

This article was originally published on The Conversation. The publication contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. On a small stretch of beach at Ostional in Costa Rica, hundreds of thousands of sea turtles nest simultaneously in events known as arribadas. Because there are so many...

Mar 12, 2015

Photos of the Incredible Leatherback Turtle Rescue

Wildlife experts rescued a stranded leatherback turtle in South Carolina on March 7. The 475-pound (215 kilograms) teenage turtle was the first leatherback ever rescued alive in South Carolina. It took five people to lift the leatherback from the beach and bring it to the South Carolina Aquarium's Sea Turtle...

Mar 12, 2015

Rescued Leatherback Turtle Released Today in South Carolina

A huge sea turtle found stranded on a remote South Carolina beach over the weekend was returned to the wild today (March 12). The nearly 500-lb. (215 kilograms) leatherback turtle was rescued Saturday (March 7) on Yawkey-South Island Reserve, a barrier island near Georgetown, suffering from low blood sugar and...

Jun 24, 2015

Ancient, Shell-Less Turtle Sported Whiplike Tail

An ancestor of modern-day turtles, a shell-less creature with a long tail once puttered around an ancient lake, likely munching on insects and worms with its peglike teeth, a new study finds. Researchers found the first fossils of the 240-million-year-old creature in 2006, during an excavation of Vellberg Lake, an...

Sep 29, 2015

Rare Fluorescent Sea Turtle Glows Red and Green

Below the tropical waves near the Solomon Islands, nighttime divers spotted a psychedelic vision: an endangered sea turtle glowing bright red and green. The divers immediately began filming the creature, a hawksbill sea turtle (Eretmochelys imbricate), following it for a few minutes until it swam away. It was such a...

Oct 1, 2015

Turtle Facts

Turtles are reptiles with hard shells that protect them from predators. They are among the oldest and most primitive groups of reptiles, having evolved millions of years ago. Turtles live all over the world in almost every type of climate. According to the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS), the turtle...

Oct 21, 2015

New Species of Giant Tortoise Found in the Galápagos

Paging Charles Darwin: The island of Santa Cruz within the Galápagos has not one but two distinct species of giant tortoise, a new genetic study finds. For years, researchers thought that the giant tortoises living on the western and eastern sides of Santa Cruz belonged to the same species. But...

Nov 6, 2015

8 Baby Turtles and Tortoises: Cute, and Critically Endangered (Photos)

Avi Shuter is a wild-animal keeper at the Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Bronx Zoo Herpetology Department. Julie Larsen Maher is staff photographer for WCS. In addition to documenting WCS field work, Maher photographs the animals at WCS's five New York-based wildlife parks: the Bronx Zoo, Central Park Zoo, New York...

Dec 28, 2015

Turtles' Wayward Travels May Mean BP Oil Spill's Impact Was Global

The far-flung journeys of juvenile sea turtles could mean that the impact of 2010's Deepwater Horizon oil spill was global. More than 300,000 sea turtles were likely in the region of the Gulf of Mexico affected by the oil spill, according to a new computer simulation. About three-quarters of these...

Feb 25, 2016

Funeral Feast? Butchered Turtles in Ancient Grave Hint at Ritual

In an ancient settlement on the banks of the Tigris River in Turkey, archaeologists have made a strange discovery: 17 butchered soft-shelled turtles in the grave of a woman and child. These river turtles were not a typical Mesopotamian menu offering 2,500 years ago, but the researchers think that, in...

Jul 7, 2016

Baby Turtles Mysteriously Dying on Australian Island

There may be such a thing as too many turtles, according to scientists investigating why so few turtle eggs were hatching on Raine Island, located on the tip of Australiaꞌs Great Barrier Reef. For more than 1,000 years, green sea turtles have nested on Raine Island, where they dig pits...