Leatherback turtle , a huge sea turtle that was captured and catalogued in 1700, with the scientific name of Dermochelys Coriacea Testudo . The first specimen is still preserved, in its original form, at the Zoology Museum of the University of Padua. It is a turtle of truly extraordinary dimensions and that pays the price of marine pollution, like many others of its kind.
Leatherback Turtle: Mouth
The mouth of the leatherback turtle is a small W-shaped beak , very small compared to the rest of the body, of the carapace which is a mosaic of small bony plates, smooth and thick as the skin is smooth. In English the leatherback turtle is also called “ leatherback turtle”.
On the carapace we see 7 longitudinal crests, on the plastron 5 keels and it is concave in the male and convex in the female. Another difference between the two sexes is found in the penis which is shorter in the female specimens while in the males it can even exceed the length of the posterior fins.
Leatherback Turtle: Habitat
This turtle loves to splash around in warm and temperate seas and usually stays calm in the open sea, approaching the coasts for only two valid reasons: to reproduce and to hunt. In Italy there are no nesting areas, in general it deposits late at night, at the beginning of summer, between 50 and 150 eggs each time in holes a meter or more deep.
The young are born after about 60 days, but many of them die, on average one in a thousand survives. The diet of the leatherback turtle is based on large jellyfish and occasionally fish, crustaceans and echinoderms , on average it is a species that reproduces once every 2 or 3 years.
Leatherback Turtle: Dimensions
This leatherback turtle is in fact the largest turtle in the world, as well as being the only species of the genus Dermochelys and the family Dermochelyidae . When born it is already 5.5 cm long which is not a small amount for a turtle, as it grows it can reach 250 cm in length, there are also 3 meter ones but they are exceptions. As for weight, we are at 600-700 Kg.
Leatherback Turtle: Extinction
The average lifespan of the leatherback turtle is estimated to be around 50 years , also because, in addition to being a fast swimmer, it can be aggressive if harassed. The problem is that there are dangers from which it cannot defend itself, such as molesters, and these are linked to the habitat in which it lives, which is increasingly polluted.
In the IUCN Red List it was considered critically endangered until 2013 and it is still forbidden to capture it but marine pollution puts this species in difficulty as it can ingest floating plastic bags that it mistakes for jellyfish and does not find the nesting sites clean. In 2013 it was downgraded from critically endangered to vulnerable but attention must remain high.
Leatherback Turtle: Sighting
The beaching of a turtle like this in the Mediterranean dates back to 2017, celebrated as an event because it hadn’t really happened in years. Unfortunately, it was found dead on a beach in Calella, about fifty kilometers north of Barcelona, Spain. It was possible to observe its features, in all of its two meters and about 700 kilos of weight.
The event is indeed an event, both because the leatherback is among the most endangered turtle species, and because it is rare to observe them in the Mediterranean. Another recent beaching of the turtle dates back to 2011 , again a dead specimen, trapped in ropes and chains of buoys
Leatherback Turtle: History
We have seen one of the most recent sightings, let’s discover one of the first, which dates back to 1760 when a giant sea turtle was captured near Ostia and donated to the University of Padua by Pope Clement XIII.
It was precisely in these circumstances that the cataloguing and its depiction were carried out, the first, very precious ones to then recognise and understand this animal better. The scholar who took charge of doing it was Domenico Agostino Vandelli who also gave the turtle the name , in 1761, of “Dermochelys Coriacea Testudo”.
Carl Linnaeus used this material to describe the species in the XII edition of Systema Naturae while the original specimen from which everything started remains in Padua, preserved in the Museum of Zoology of the University of Padua.
Leatherback turtle and other turtles
If there are still leatherback turtles, even if few, there are other species that are completely extinct like that of Eosphargis Lydekker . These turtles lived in the lower Eocene (Ypresian, between 55.8 and 50.3 million years ago), we have found fossil remains both in Europe and in North America . The interesting thing is that there are many similarities between this extinct turtle and the Leatherback, even if the first was smaller, in fact it had a carapace of a meter and a half, maximum, very wide and flat.