Hoax-Slayer.com has this take on the story. It's making the rounds that a giant turtle from the Amazon has been captured and was seen being hauled on a flatbed. The weight is being given as 800 lbs, which is ridiculous: if this living igloo were real, it might weigh ten times that. It's a prop from a Japanese monster movie.
Was there, or is there, any real turtle remotely close to tank-sized? No, but they come from an impressive line that's produced some mighty creatures,
Turtles have poked along in the oceans for a long time.
The body plan emerged in the Permian with species like Eunotosaurus africanus,
continued into the Mesozoic, culminated in the spectacular Archelon, a
leathery-shelled Cretaceous denizen that could be 13 feet long overall and 16
feet across the flippers and weigh 5,000 pounds. The only rival for the biggest
turtle was Stupendemys geographicus, a freshwater type that came along tens of
millions of years later.
The reign of
turtles continues today in seven species of large ocean-going turtles. The king of marine reptiles is the
leatherback, which can be ten feet long and weigh up to a ton. It has an
insulating fat layer that allows it to forage far north of other sea turtles,
to the seas off Norway, British Columbia, and Kamchatka. It is desperately
endangered thanks to a perfect storm of poaching, egg theft, the loss of
nesting beaches, accidental catches in fishing nets and shrimp trawls, and the
proliferation of plastic bags – a fatally inviting snack for an animal that
lives off jellyfish. It can dive to 1,200m. There are still 20,000 to 40,000
nesting females, but these numbers compare to 115,000 as recently as 1982. The fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea calls them trunk turtles, a good name for an animal that looks rather like a giant's luggage.
So here's to the turtles. Long may they plod.
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