“The total turtle count - two hundred and thirty species - doesn't seem like an irresistible horde compared to the several thousand mammals in today's global ecosystem. However, turtles have scored quite an impressive ecological triumph in one very important role, that of freshwater predator-omnivore… All through the Temperate Zone, otters delight the naturalist and the lay public. But how many other freshwater, semi-aquatic mammal predators can you name? Mink, of course. Relatives of otters on one hand, land weasels on the other, mink do hunt in streams. How many others? If you caught the excellent BBC series "Life on Earth", you saw footage of the swimming shrew, the Desman of the Pyrenees, a molelike furball that dives for aquatic worms and other freshwater small fry. Our own New England star-nosed mole goes hunting in water, using its starburst-shaped snout tip to feel out wriggling prey. Andean streams flowing through Preu are host to the fish-spearing mouse, Ichthyomys, that impales prey on its projecting front teeth. But if we go to a tropical lake or sluggish river, is it full of otters, mink, and paddling shrews? No, it is full of turtles.”

“And today the great Yertle, that Marvelous he,
Is King of the Mud. That is all he can see.
And the turtles, of course… all the turtles are free
As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.”

“The more 'otter it is, the more 'otter otters likes it”

“And the turtles, of course… all the turtles are free, as turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.”

“From a comparative perspective, we are a relatively monomorphic mammal, with relatively monomorphic minds.”

“The message from the tropics is unambiguous: To be a successful big land animal, you must cope with mammals, and to cope with mammals you must be a mammal yourself, or at least have metabolism as high as a mammal's. And big mammals have suppressed big reptiles in our tropics for the last sixty-five million years. So how can the dinosaurs' success over mammals' be explained? By assuming that dinosaurs had low-energy metabolic styles? Not very likely.”

“One might expect that mammals would have taken over the land verte­brate communities immediately, but they did not. From their appearance in the Triassic until the end of the Creta­ceous, a span of 140 million years, mam­mals remained smal and inconspicuous while all the ecological roles of large ter­restrial herbivores and carnivores were monopolized by dinosaurs; mammals did not begin to radiate and produce large species until after the dinosaurs had al­ready become extinct at the end of the Cretaceous. One is forced to conclude that dinosaurs were competitively su­perior to mammals as large land vertebrates. And that would be baffling if dinosaurs were "cold-blooded."”

“These small freshwater fish”

“If a turtle doesn't have a shell, is he homeless or naked?”

“There’s no good reason (and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.”