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 ...

Turtles may be weird, but according to new research, they’re not that weird. Their funny arrangement of shell and shoulder is just the same old land-dweller vertebrate stuff — with a little fold. At ...

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 ...

The ribs of a 240 million-year-old fossil hold clues to how the first turtle shell evolved. And its skull shape seems closer to that of lizards... How The Turtle Got Its Shell The fossilized remains ...

Unique among Earth's creatures, turtles are the only animals to form a shell on the outside of their bodies through a fusion of modified ribs, vertebrae and shoulder girdle bones. The turtle shell is ...

It’s a debate that’s left more than a few scientists shell-shocked: Just how did the turtle come to acquire its unique suit of armor? Some have insisted for decades that the turtle’s carapace evolved ...

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 ...

An illustration of Pappochelys, based on its 240-million-year-old fossilized remains. This ancestor to today's turtle was about 8 inches long. The fossilized remains of a bizarre-looking reptile are ...

A turtle’s shell makes for a great portable home, offering a huge amount of protection to the animal living inside. But this carapace is nothing more than an evolutionary byproduct of another ...