i love turtles
and i would like to encounter as many types of turtles as i can before i die! they are such good creatures. i adore their silly faces.
i'm building this website based off of the turtle taxonomy from Wikipedia. like all taxonomies, there's a lot of fuzziness and swapping classifications around, so it'll be exciting to see how this changes over time. i'm counting all animals in the order Testudines (there are only like 300-odd extant species, that's less than the national dex in pokémon emerald). to-date, most of the encounters have been at zoos. sometimes i catch a pond slider or two when i'm out for a walk, but i don't have much experience (yet!) with turtle-spotting in the wild.
order: Testudines
suborder: Cryptodira
- Carettochelyidae (pig-nosed or Fly River turtle); seen 1/1 species
- Cheloniidae (sea turtles minus leatherback); seen 1/6 species
- Chelydridae (snapping turtles); seen 1/5 species
- Dermatemydidae (Central American river turtle); seen x/x species
- Dermochelyidae (leatherback sea turtle); seen x/1 species
- Emydidae (pond turtles/sliders, my favorites!!!); seen x/x species
- Geoemydidae (Asian box turtles); seen x/x species
- Kinosternidae (mud turtles); seen x/x species
- Platysternidae (big-headed turtle); seen 0/1 species
- Testudinidae (tortoises, also my favorites!!! i have many favorites); seen x/x species
- Trionychidae (softshell turtles); seen x/x species
suborder: Pleurodira (side-neck turtles)
- Chelidae (Austro-American side-neck turtles); seen x/x species
- Pelomedusidae (Afro-American side-neck turtles); seen x/x species
- Podocnemididae (South American side-neck river turtles); seen x/x species