Do turtle shells actually consist of modified ribs? The answer, surprisingly, is yes. This weird-but-true claim went viral in mid-June 2021 when Twitter user and post-doctorate turtle expert Ceri ...

SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — A tweet from a UCSD Postdoc went viral this month. Turtle expert Ceri Weber posted that a turtle's shell is actually not a shell at all, but rather a set of modified ribs. It's true ...

Maybe collecting shells is a favorite pastime of yours, but you don't know which is a moon snail and which is a mud snail. Or, you're walking along the beach, and something shiny catches your eye, but ...

Famous for carrying its shelled "home" on its back, the humble, plodding turtle has also been toting around one of the biggest mysteries of the animal kingdom. Paleontologists have now unearthed a ...

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 ...

Six-year-old Luke Callihan, of Pennington, collects shells on the beach in Brigantine, Sunday, July 2, 2017. (Lori M. Nichols | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) This story was originally published August ...

An artistic rendering shows an early proto turtle Eunotosaurus (foreground) burrowing into the banks of a dried-up pond to escape the harsh arid environment present 260 million years ago in South ...

Since the age of dinosaurs, turtles have looked pretty much as they do now with their shells intact, and scientists lacked conclusive evidence to support competing evolutionary theories. Now with the ...

Through careful study of an ancient ancestor of modern turtles, researchers now have a clearer picture of how the turtles' most unusual shell came to be. The findings help to fill a 30- to ...

The turtle's shell may serve as a protective shield nowadays, but ancient turtles actually developed shells for an entirely different reason, a new study finds. Researchers looked at the remains of 47 ...

The turtle has been in no rush to give up the secret of its shell — but after two centuries of close study, scientists are filling in the story of a structure unique in the history of life.New ...