Melissa's Herp Home Page Melissa Kaplan's page for Herps. Here you will find care sheets and articles about any herp you care to name.

Slowcoach This is a tortoise page - dedicated purely to tortoises wouldn't you know. Again, care sheets and articles about these chelonians.

Home Page of the Tortoise Trust The Tortoise Trust Homepage. Based in Britain, the trust looks after tortoises worldwide through its conservation activities, as well as its base in Wales where it keeps animals in captivity. Plenty of care sheets available. For UK£10 you can join and help their work.

Triassic Park

The earliest tortoise fossils date back to about 180 million years ago in the triassic period. Just imagine it - the lush tropical vegetation, the lapping of warm inland seas, the soft footfall of Procompsognathus...who?

Oh, alright then, Saltoposuchus. No? Okay, these guys were the original small carniverous dinosaurs. About the size of a turkey, they lived on the eggs of the larger herbivorous creatures such as Plateosaurus.

Thing is, while these animals came and went, the tortoise is still quietly going about its business today just as it was 180 million years ago. And, you may ask, what is that business? Well you may ask indeed. Being a tortoise is serious stuff - you get to do a lot of basking in the sun. Then you have to motivate yourself to eat all those greens at lunch time and dammit, there's that afternoon nap to get out of the way before tea. It's a hard life, but someone's got to do it. You have to admit it, something that's been around that long has to have something going for it...