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Because she doesn’t need to be fast! Its shell offers such sure protection against predators that there is no need to waste energy walking at speed. “This protection is so efficient that, in about 200 million years, the turtles survived until the cataclysm that extinguished the dinosaurs”, says biologist Flávio de Barros Molina, head of the Reptiles Sector at the Zoological Park Foundation of São Paulo. Land tortoises, known as tortoises, are actually among the slowest land animals, particularly species such as the American swamp turtle (Clemmys muhlenbergii), which takes a whole day to travel just 17 meters.
However, this slowness is not shared by aquatic turtles, which manage to develop reasonable speeds. The green turtle (chelonia mydas), for example, is capable of swimming at up to 20 km/h – with one detail: females move faster than males, probably to be able to protect their young.
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