A history of British reptiles / By Thomas Bell...Illustrated by more than forty woodcuts.

  • Thomas Bell
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A history of British reptiles / By Thomas Bell...Illustrated by more than forty woodcuts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    shaped. ‘The fresh-water forms are all of them carnivorous ; the neck is therefore long, the legs lax and flexible, and the feet palmated to enable them to pursue their prey with consi- derable rapidity ; whilst the marine Turtles have them modi- fied into true paddles, the toes being entirely concealed by hard scaled skin. These modifications of form are very inter- esting, as evincing an admirable adaptation of a general plan of structure to the varied habits of the different groups. The jaws of all these different forms are covered with a hard, sharp, horny beak, the lower portion of which shuts within the upper, and the portions of food are cut or snapped off, as it were, on the principle of shears. The aquatic spe- cies aid the separation of their food, which they seize with their jaws, by tearing it by means of their long and sharp claws. ‘They thus pursue, seize, and tear in pieces living frogs, and other aquatic reptiles, fish, and even young water birds; and so forcible and violent is their bite, that I have known a stick of half.an inch in diameter at once snapped asunder by the jaws of a snapping ‘Turtle, Chelydra serpen- tina ; and a specimen of T'rionyx, lately in the possession of Mr. Cross, of the Surrey Zoological Gardens, snapped off the finger of a sailor when on his voyage to this country. The whole of the Testudinata are strictly oviparous, and the egg is covered by a calcareous shell, like that of birds ; the eggs of the land Tortoises, as well as those of the marine Turtles, are generally round; but those of the fresh-water genera are usually more or less oval or elliptical. The multi- tudes of fresh-water Tortoises in some districts is astonish- ingly great, and their eggs form a lucrative article of com- merce from the quantity of oil which is obtained from them. It has been already stated that we have no indigenous species of this order. There are, however, on record several well-authenticated instances of marine T'urtles, of two distinct species, having found their way to our coasts, one of them
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