#turtle neck animal

[herpsandbirds]

Dahl’s Toad-Headed Turtles (Mesoclemmys dahli), family Chelidae, endemic to northern Colombia

CRITICALLY ENDANGERED.

Endangered due to habitat degradation and fragmentation.

photographs: Yeiner Vega (juveniles) and Luis Rojas

[arthistoryanimalia]

For #TurtleTuesday + #TwoForTuesday, two different versions of Two Long Neck Turtles, 2019, by Reuben Balarda Manakgu (Mandjuringunj clan, West Arhnem Land, b.1965) Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 26 x 43cm & 40 x 50 cm

[uncharismatic-fauna]

A Mata-Fine Mata Mata turtle

A resident of the Amazon and Orinoco river basins, the mata mata (Chelus fimbriatus) is a species of freshwater turtle found in streams, pools, and wetlands throughout northern South America, from Venezuela to Brazil, as well as the island of Trinidad. This species is almost entirely aquatic, and excursions on land are extremely rare. However, they are not well adapted for swimming in open water, and are thus most commonly seen in shallow bodies of water with soft, muddy bottoms.

C. fimbriatus has a unique appearance among turtle species. The carapace-- the part of the shell that covers the back--it has three ridges running down its length and is often covered in algae, and so resembles tree bark. The head is similarly shaped to resemble leaf litter; it’s triangular, and the fringes around the cheeks and mouth break up the outline. The mata mata’s nose is long and snorkel-like, allowing it to remain just under the surface. Despite its unobtrusive looks, this species is actually quite large; mata mata can grow up to 45 cm (1.5 ft) long and weigh up to 17.2 kg (38 lbs).

Because of its unique body shape and camouflage, the mata mata is well suited to a sedentary life, and has few natural predators. It has extremely poor eyesight, though it does share an adaptation with other nocturnal reptiles that allows the eyes to reflect low levels of light. To compensate, the mata mata relies on its hearing, amplified by a large tympanium on either side of the head, and on the barbels lining its jaw. In addition to being an excellent costume, these barbels allow C. fimbriatus to sense vibrations in the water. The mata mata spends most of its time submurged or buried under the mud, waiting for potential prey like fish, worms, crustaceans, and insects to swim by. When they’re close enough, the mata mata opens its jaws and sucks its target in whole. Individuals have also been recorded herding schools of fish into confined areas before feeding.

The only time the mata mata emerges from the water is to reproduce. Individuals are solitary until September or October, when they begin to seek out mates. When a male encounters a female, he approaches while opening and closing his mouth, extending his limbs, and moving the flaps on the side of his head. If the female is impressed, she allows him to mount. Afterwards, she hauls herself out onto the nearby bank and builds a rudimentary nest from the forest litter. There, she lays 12-28 eggs, which will take about 200 days to hatch. There is no information on how long hatchlings take to fully mature, but individuals can live anywhere from 15-30 years.

Conservation status: The mata mata has not been evaluated by the IUCN, but is threatened by habitat destruction and overharvesting for the pet trade.

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Photos

Rune Midtgaard

Christopher Wellner

Joachim S. Muller

[sonette22]

The instant attraction that I felt when I first landed my eyes on Kota Sako. Like, my attention had been on Hayate the whole time before Sako showed up but I knew eyepatch guy will just be a temporary obsession until I found the true man.

[boohohoo]

Idk wtf is happening with Rnm anime (what with the amount of teasers but no actual releasing date when its june already) but i see long hair Rick and i want more of him please 👀

[simina-cindy]

Shani

Tribal turtle character I made, now taller, with a name, and an alternate outfit. The "hair" is actually thick ropes, part of the bandana.

Art and character belong to me. Do not copy or reupload.

[passiveagressiveintrovert]

Assorted Australian animal's ive found in the wild lol

[dianadeadwing]

Bobtober Day 22 - Scratchy

Thought process was Scratchy> Christmas sweaters > the pin worm ep > turtle neck > Hana Barbera > Animation

This is an animation test on procreate. I’ve done a teeny bit of animation before on photo shop so I wanted to play around with iPad tools a little. And I messed up the layers. Eventually I hope to animate some dancing kiddos.

[jabberwockprince]

sorry to every fuckin OC ive inflicted with turtle neck shirts, these things fucking suck (<- has an extremely sensitive neck and will suffocate at the slightest bit of pressure)

[erythristicbones]

Helped a friend cross the road safely today C: it's a Florida Softshell Turtle!

[herpsandbirds]

Irwin's Snapping Turtle (Elseya irwini), family Chelidae, endemic to the Burdekin River in QLD, Australia

Discovered in 1990 by Bob and Steve Irwin, yes THAT Steve Irwin. The turtle is named for him.

Like other Australian side-necked turtles, this species is capable of cloacal respiration (they use small sacs in their cloacal lining like a gill).

photographs by Zoological Association of America & Jeff Tan

[blob-chan]

Also!!! The reason you gotta grab the back half of their shell is because these guys have long enough necks to fuck up your fingies if you grab any more forward than that. It does say danger in the helpful graphic above but in this case its the chompers you have to worry about.

trying to decide if i'd rather be a tortoise or a turtle. on the one hand I prefer dry land, on the other hand turtles can breathe out of their cloacae so. it's tricky

[simina-cindy]

Portrait of my original character, Shani. She is the benevolent leader of her people, and also has eyelashes for days.

Art and character belong to me. Do not copy or reupload.

[knuppitalism-with-ue]

Something that has both fascinated me and frustrated me to no end as of late are the lacrimal crests of allosauroids and other such theropods. No living theropods, to my knowledge, possess such structures. The closest analog I could find were Geese. I'm being driven up a wall trying to figure out what they would have been covered with in life. How would they have been incorporated into the face of the theropod? What display structures could they support? Air sacs, keratin, or caruncles? How pneumatized were they? Were they even for display? Most paleoartists just reconstruct them as odd stones sitting on top of the animals head, or say they were just for shading the eyes, but that can't be it, right? It feels like something is missing.

As a Paleoartist, is there anything you can say on this? Because I don't know nearly enough.

Oh boi, this is a tricky one.

Cranial ornaments come in all kinds of shapes, sizes and surface textures. For Allosaurus it seems likely that they simply had keratin sheets on top of the lacrinal crests, at least that's what the rough surface and striations suggest. However it also seems like air sacs were reaching up from the antorbital fenestra

This is how I would reconstruct that part of Allosaurus in the moment.

There could have been more though, you can see in this photo of the skull of Big Al II that this animal had large opening behind the lacrinal crests, so there could have been other structures involved.

Maybe even better to look at is this 3d scan of Arkhane, from Brussels.

This could have been related to theroregulation, more display structures or simply further weight reduction.

There is quite a bit of wiggle room when it comes to the interpretation of dinosaur facial features and there is way too much already published and at the same time too little to put it all into a single blog post.

Also not all dinosaurus follow this patters, the cranial crests of oviraptorosaurs show no good indication for keratin crests for example. So it's better to say good bye to cassowary interpretations of these animals and instead cover them in skin and/or inflatable sacs, because these hollow chambers appear to be extensions of the sinuses. (my version of Corythoraptor on the right, Citipati from Wikipedia on the left.)

And then again in other theropods like Abelisaurs we see very rugose skull tops but without the striations you see on the lacrinals of Allosaurus, potentially indicating large scales. Here my, slightly over the top, interpretation of Skorpiovenator. And even then: within abelisaurus you have stuff like Carnotaurus which shows clear signs of keratin sheets on its horns.

This all has been complicated in recent years with new methods in bone histology, because as it turns out the internal structure of a bone can tell us stuff about it's outside, that's how we for example found out that Amargosaurus neck spines were no horns and probably conected with soft tissue, or that the osteoderms of notosuchians were covered by skin like in leatherback turtles.

Going back to Allosaurus and other allosauroids. Keratin sheets, scales, air sacs, all these were probably present in these animals, but their exact distribution is still a question of debate.

Here a paper from a few years back that maps para-nasal sinuses in extent and extinct archosaurus which gives you a little idea how complex their internal anatomy could get

https://anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/ar.20794