![new york zoos and aquarium build your wild self new york zoos and aquarium build your wild self](https://blog.kreanimo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/wildself.jpg)
He also noted that it wasn’t expected to live long, even though it had already broken the existing record by living two weeks. Their backs, marked by seven long lines that join at the tail, resembled a harp, hence their then-common nickname: harp turtles.Ĭharles Haskins Townsend, the aquarium’s first director, proclaimed that this harp turtle – the second to have arrived at the aquarium in 1908 – was ‘the largest specimen … on exhibition anywhere’.
NEW YORK ZOOS AND AQUARIUM BUILD YOUR WILD SELF SKIN
Instead, leatherbacks have a soft skin covering a couple of inches of oily connective tissue with an embedded mosaic of small bones. Leatherbacks, the largest of the living sea turtles with records exceeding 1,400 lbs (635 kg) – more than 500 lbs (227 kg) larger than the turtle in the photograph – are part of a line of turtles stretching back over 100 million years, and are easily distinguished from the other six living marine turtle species by their lack of a hard shell.
![new york zoos and aquarium build your wild self new york zoos and aquarium build your wild self](https://live.staticflickr.com/2151/2362112368_9a7bafaa4b_b.jpg)
The animal in this case is a leatherback turtle ( Dermochelys coriacea). The children are only there to provide scale and to help the viewer imagine the extraordinary experience of sitting on the back of something so remarkable. It is the animal that is the interesting element. But as much as the boys are at the centre of this photograph, they are not the reason for it. The children, with faces ranging from something like happy through bored to skeptical, echo others in so many similar photographs from the late-19th and early 20th centuries. There wouldn’t have been any ‘riding’ here just sitting on the back of an animal taken out of its tank for a photo-op. This is a large marine turtle, barely able to move itself on land. At the time the photograph was taken, there had already been postcards published by zoos of children riding on the backs of giant tortoises from the Galápagos Islands. At the feet of the children, near the animal’s front left flipper, is a messy coil of rope, presumably dropped after being used to hoist the turtle onto the pavement. The turtle lies flattened upon a pathway in front of a fence. In the archives of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, there is an old postcard from the city aquarium of a large sea turtle with four boys straddling its back.