Concept
Tortoise
Related concepts (16)
Turtle shell
The turtle shell is a shield for the ventral and dorsal parts of turtles (the order Testudines), completely enclosing all the vital organs of the turtle and in some cases even the head. It is constructed of modified bony elements such as the ribs, parts of the pelvis and other bones found in most reptiles. The bone of the shell consists of both skeletal and dermal bone, showing that the complete enclosure of the shell likely evolved by including dermal armor into the rib cage.
Herpetology
Herpetology (from Greek ἑρπετόν herpetón, meaning "reptile" or "creeping animal") is the branch of zoology concerned with the study of amphibians (including frogs, toads, salamanders, newts, and caecilians (gymnophiona)) and reptiles (including snakes, lizards, amphisbaenids, turtles, terrapins, tortoises, crocodilians, and the tuataras). Birds, which are cladistically included within Reptilia, are traditionally excluded here; the scientific study of birds is the subject of ornithology.
Gila monster
The Gila monster (Heloderma suspectum, ˈhiːlə ) is a species of venomous lizard native to the Southwestern United States and the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora. It is a heavy, typically slow-moving reptile, up to long, and it is the only venomous lizard native to the United States. Its venomous close relatives, the four beaded lizards (all former subspecies of Heloderma horridum) inhabit Mexico and Guatemala. The Gila monster is sluggish in nature, so it is not generally dangerous and very rarely poses a real threat to humans.
Deity
A deity or god is a supernatural being who is considered divine or sacred. The Oxford Dictionary of English defines deity as a god or goddess, or anything revered as divine. C. Scott Littleton defines a deity as "a being with powers greater than those of ordinary humans, but who interacts with humans, positively or negatively, in ways that carry humans to new levels of consciousness, beyond the grounded preoccupations of ordinary life". Religions can be categorized by how many deities they worship.
Egg
An egg is an organic vessel grown by an animal to carry a possibly fertilized egg cell (a zygote) and to incubate from it an embryo within the egg until the embryo has become an animal fetus that can survive on its own, at which point the animal hatches. Most arthropods, vertebrates (excluding live-bearing mammals), and mollusks lay eggs, although some, such as scorpions, do not. Reptile eggs, bird eggs, and monotreme eggs are laid out of water and are surrounded by a protective shell, either flexible or inflexible.
Turtle
Turtles are an order of reptiles known as Testudines, characterized by a special shell developed mainly from their ribs. Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Cryptodira (hidden necked turtles), which differ in the way the head retracts. There are 360 living and recently extinct species of turtles, including land-dwelling tortoises and freshwater terrapins. They are found on most continents, some islands and, in the case of sea turtles, much of the ocean.
Galápagos Islands
The Galápagos Islands (islas Galápagos) are an archipelago of volcanic islands in the Eastern Pacific, located around the Equator west of South America. They form the Galápagos Province of the Republic of Ecuador, with a Spanish-speaking population of slightly over 33,000 (2020). The province is divided into the cantons of San Cristóbal, Santa Cruz, and Isabela, the three most populated islands in the chain. The Galápagos are famous for their large number of endemic species, which were studied by Charles Darwin in the 1830s and inspired his theory of evolution by means of natural selection.
Odontochelys
Odontochelys semitestacea (meaning "toothed turtle with a half-shell") is a Late Triassic relative of turtles. Before Pappochelys was discovered and Eunotosaurus was redescribed, Odontochelys was considered the oldest undisputed member of Pantestudines (i.e. a stem-turtle). It is the only known species in the genus Odontochelys and the family Odontochelyidae. Odontochelys semitestacea was first described from three 200-million-year-old specimens excavated in Triassic deposits in Guizhou, China.
Oracle bone
Oracle bones () are pieces of ox scapula and turtle plastron, which were used for pyromancy – a form of divination – in ancient China, mainly during the late Shang dynasty. Scapulimancy is the specific term if ox scapulae were used for the divination, plastromancy if turtle plastrons were used. A recent count estimated that there were about 13,000 bones with a total of a little over 130,000 inscriptions in collections in China and some fourteen other countries.
Snake
Snakes are elongated, limbless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes (s3r'pEntiːz). Like all other squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads (cranial kinesis). To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung.