this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Blessed Turtle
Tortoise. Turtles are aquatic and have flippers. Terrapins have webbed claws and are active on both land and water. Tortoise only live on land and they have feet with blunt nails.
If the order Testudines refers to turtles then all tortoises are turtles (though not all turtles are tortoises).
All squares are turtles. All circles are turtles. It's turtles all the way down.
And it does seem to refer to that in English. Should it, though? Turtles in the narrow sense of sea turtles (Chelonioidea) are an inner branch of the whole Testudines tree, making tortoises unnecessarily paraphyletic (incomplete). It would be more logical to make tortoises the equivalent of Testudines and turtles the equivalent of Chelonioidea. Alas, English taxonomy is not always following the evolutionary logic.
Toitles