Turtles And Tortoises News

Eighty-eight-year-old Le Huy Hoanh stands up from his bench and carefully poured tea in rural Vietnam, and mimes for us how he used to kill gods. With his long spear…

This is the second article in our six-part series “Traveling the Pan Borneo Highway.” Read Part One. TELOK SERABANG, Malaysia — At the westernmost tip of Borneo sits a dense…

The sex of some turtle species is influenced not by genes but by the temperatures they experience in the nest. Eggs incubated at cooler temperatures develop into males, while those…

The Con X Tech Prize just announced its second round will be funding 20 finalists each with $3,500 to create their first prototypes. Some 150 teams submitted ideas that use…

It was a chance encounter. But it turned Bunty Tao's life around. In mid-June, a group of boys were heading back from a fishing trip to a forest near the…

In a boost to jaguars and other iconic wildlife of Central America, the government of Belize has approved a proposal to protect the Maya Forest Corridor, a key stretch of…

Chimpanzees in Gabon's Loango National Park have tortoises on their menu. For the first time, researchers have observed the great apes vigorously smashing forest hinge-back tortoises (Kinixys erosa) against tree…

Until recently, there were just four known Yangtze giant softshell turtles in the world. On April 13, the only known female among them died in China’s Suzhou Shangfangshan Forest Zoo…

Customs officials in the Philippines have seized 1,529 live turtles that they found wrapped in duct tape inside four suitcases abandoned at Manila’s international airport. The confiscated turtles include threatened…

July 12 saw highs in the mid-80s in New York City this year — a typically hot, muggy NYC summer day. Perfect beach weather, in other words. It was a…

In the beginning, Shahriar Caesar Rahman’s trips to the remote forests of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh would invariably end in frustration. Rahman was searching for reptiles, and based…

Authorities in Madagascar confiscated 7,347 radiated tortoises (Astrochelys radiata) from wildlife traffickers on Oct. 24, just months after a similar bust led to the seizure of nearly 10,000 tortoises of…

Turtles were once a tough group of animals. Sea turtles survived the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. But the modern descendants of this…

In a video that went viral in 2015, researchers spent nearly 10 minutes pulling out a 10-centimeter (4-inch) plastic straw from the nostril of a male olive ridley turtle (Lepidochelys olivacea)…

In Morocco’s live animal markets, a wide variety of wildlife is available for sale. There’s the threatened spur-thighed tortoise (Testudo graeca), going for around $1, and the endangered Barbary macaque (Macaca…

A puzzling disease lurks among western pond turtles, one of only two native freshwater turtle species that live in the state of Washington in the U.S. The disease produces deep…

An international effort is underway in Madagascar to save thousands of threatened tortoises that were discovered in an abandoned house in the city of Toliara in April. The first descriptions…

Authorities in Madagascar seized almost 10,000 critically endangered tortoises earlier this month from a house suspected to be a waypoint for funneling them into Asia’s pet trade. The Turtle Survival…

When Cu Rua, an old Yangtze giant softshell turtle, died in Vietnam in 2016, he left behind only three of his kind: an elderly pair in a Chinese zoo, and…

What do the world’s tiniest chameleon, a color-changing snake, and a turtle that breathes through its genitals have in common? Each of these reptiles sits perched on its own unique…