Eastern Box Turtle — printable fact sheet
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Eastern Box Turtle
Terrapene carolina carolina
Terrapene carolina carries a door. Its plastron, the underside of the shell, has a hinge across the middle that lets the front and rear halves fold up against the carapace and seal the animal in completely, leaving no gap for a raccoon's teeth — a solution no other North America…
Did you know?
- Eastern Box Turtles can survive with severe injuries, including broken shells, thanks to their slow metabolism and remarkable healing abilities.
- Sex is determined by the temperature at which the eggs incubate rather than by chromosomes, so a warming climate can skew whole cohorts one way. Adult males usually have bright red irises and females brown or yellow ones, one of the more reliable sexual distinctions in turtles. A box turtle that has been badly cracked can heal and regrow shell over many years, and wild individuals are frequently found bearing old, healed injuries from mowers and fires. Because a box turtle may not breed until it is around ten and can live past eighty, the loss of a single adult removes decades of future reproduction.
What I learned
Draw the eastern box turtle
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