The turtle shell is a wonderful example of a genuine morphological novelty, since it has no counterpart in any other extant vertebrate lineages. The evolutionary origin of the shell is a question that has fascinated evolutionary biologists for over two centuries and it still remains a mystery. One of the turtle innovations associated with the shell is the carapacial ridge (CR), a bulge that app...

Despite increased efforts from government agencies, scientists, and non-government organizations over the past few decades, anthropogenic sources of sea turtle mortality continue to threaten the survivorship of sea turtle species around the globe. More recent efforts to engage local people with community-based sea turtle conservation programs have been based primarily on economic incentives and...

Urea is the major excretory end product of nitrogen metabolism in most chelonian reptiles. In the present study, we report the isolation of a 1632 base pair cDNA from turtle kidney with one open reading frame putatively encoding a 403-residue protein, the turtle urea transporter (turtle UT). The first cloned reptilian UT has high homology with UTs (facilitated urea transporters) cloned from ver...

40 With increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, the oceans are expected to increase in acidity during the next century. Increasing ocean acidity has been shown to negatively affect many marine ecosystems, particularly calcifying organisms. We investigated acidification effects on the turtle grass communities of Little Cayman Island, British West Indies (BWI). We hypothesized that acidified s...

The turtle body plan, with its solid shell, deviates radically from those of other tetrapods. The dorsal part of the turtle shell, or the carapace, consists mainly of costal and neural bony plates, which are continuous with the underlying thoracic ribs and vertebrae, respectively. Because of their superficial position, the evolutionary origins of these costo-neural elements have long remained e...

Genomic DNAs were extracted from the turtle leg (Pollicipes mitella, 1798) population of Tongyeong, Yeosu and Manjaedo located in the southern sea of Korea. The turtle leg population from Tongyeong (0.929) exhibited higher bandsharing values than did turtle leg from Manjaedo (0.852). The higher fragment sizes (>1,200 bp) are much more observed in the Yeosu population. The number of unique loci ...

Ann Campbell Burke examines the development and evolution [5] of vertebrates, in particular, turtles [6]. Her Harvard University [7] experiments, described in "Development of the Turtle Carapace [4]: Implications for the Evolution of a Novel Bauplan," were published in 1989. Burke used molecular techniques to investigate the developmental mechanisms responsible for the formation of the turtle s...

The macro-epibiotic communities of sea turtles have been subject to growing interest in recent years, yet their micro-epibiotic counterparts are almost entirely unknown. Here, we provide the first evidence that diatoms are epibionts for all seven extant species of sea turtle. Using Scanning Electron Microscopy, we inspected superficial carapace or skin samples from a single representative of ea...

It has been established that adenosine has a critical role in the extraordinary ability of the turtle brain to survive anoxia. To further investigate this phenomenon we compared rat and turtle brain adenosine A1receptors using cyclopentyl-1,3-dipropylxanthine,8-[dipropyl-2,3-3H(N)] ([3H]DPCPX) saturation binding analyses and determined the effects of prolonged anoxia (6, 12, and 24 h) on the ad...

Despite common belief, Baby Boomers form a sizable population of gamers. Paying attention to how this generation experiences a game can help companies that target this group of users increase their market share. To address this need, this study examines Baby Boomers’ reaction to a new way of manipulating objects in a game, namely with their eyes. In particular, the study focuses on testing the ...