All printables
African Pancake Tortoise — printable fact sheet
Free to print or save as PDF. Great for classrooms, homeschooling, and young explorers.
Creature Atlas
Animal Fact Sheet
Name: ____________________
Date: ____________________
African Pancake Tortoise
Malacochersus tornieri
The pancake tortoise abandoned the one thing tortoises are famous for: armour. Its shell is flat, thin and riddled with large fenestrations — genuine holes in the underlying bone — so the whole carapace flexes like a stiff leather pad. Squeezed into a crack in a granite kopje, t…
Did you know?
- Unlike almost all other tortoise species, the African Pancake Tortoise's shell is soft and flexible, allowing it to quickly slip into rock crevices, making it very difficult for predators to extract.
- Its shell is so light and pliable that a live pancake tortoise weighs a fraction of what a same-sized domed tortoise weighs. Individuals show strong site fidelity to a single crevice, returning to the same rock for years, which makes local populations trivially easy for collectors to wipe out. Hatchlings emerge with a relatively domed shell that flattens as they grow into their rock-crevice life.
What I learned
Draw the african pancake tortoise
© Creature Atlas · www.creatureatlas.com · Free for classroom & personal use
Want the whole set?
Get printable fact-sheet packs, coloring pages, and classroom worksheet bundles for dozens of animals — ready to download and print.
Browse printable packsGet a free printable each week
Join the newsletter for a new Creature of the Week + printables.