Tortoises Mating
The tortoise is a land-dwelling reptile which is of the order Testudines. As with its aquatic cousins, the turtle and the terrapin, the tortoise is shielded from predators by a shell. The top part of the shell is called the carapace, the underside is the plastron, and the two are connected by the bridge. The tortoise has both an endoskeleton and an exoskeleton. Tortoises can vary in size from a few centimetres to up to two meters. Tortoises generally have a lifespan comparable with that of human beings and parakeets, and some individuals are known to have lived longer than 150 years. Because of this, they symbolize longevity in some cultures, such as China. The oldest tortoise ever recorded, indeed the oldest individual animal ever recorded, was Tui Malila, of Tonga. The giant tortoises of the Galápagos Islands helped Charles Darwin formulate his theory of evolution, since the isolated populations on the different islands, although descended from a common ancestor, had diverged to different forms. Harriet, still alive and living in an Australian zoo, was apocryphally thought to have been brought to England by Charles Darwin aboard the Beagle. Harriet was 175 years old as of November, 2005, and was recognized at that time as the world's oldest living animal. Most land tortoises are herbivorous in the wild. The first turtles already existed in the era of the dinosaurs, some 300 million years ago. Turtles and tortoises are the only surviving branch of the even more ancient clade Anapsida, which includes groups such as the procolophonoids, millerettids and pareiasaurs. Most of the anapsids became extinct in the late Permian period, with the exception of the procolophonoids and the precursors of the testudines (turtles and tortoises).
Size: 3590px × 5400px
Location: Everglades, Florida, USA
Photo credit: © haydn baker / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
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