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Yellow-footed tortoise

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EntityQ18867· pop 34· linked from 135 articles

Yellow-footed tortoise

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Also known as South American yellow-footed tortoise, Chelonoidis denticulata

Species of tortoise

Species

Vulnerable

Brazilian Giant Tortoise

species

Observations2,275

Continent: South-AmericaDistribution: SE Venezuela, Caribbean lowlands of Guyana, French Guiana, and Surinam; Brazil (Amazon Basin, isolated range in E Brazil), E Ecuador, Colombia, NE Peru (Pasco), N/E Bolivia, Trinidad, Guadeloupe. Type locality: in error (see comment)

via IUCN

~16 min read

Encyclopedic overview

The yellow-footed tortoise (Chelonoidis denticulatus), also known as the Brazilian giant tortoise, is a species of tortoise in the family Testudinidae and is closely related to the red-footed tortoise (C. carbonarius). It is found in the Amazon Basin of South America. The species name has often been misspelled as denticulata, an error introduced in the 1980s when Chelonoidis was elevated to genus and mistakenly treated as feminine, an error recognized and fixed in 2017.

With an average length of 40 cm (15.75 in) and the largest known specimen at 94 cm (37 in), this is the sixth-largest tortoise species on Earth, after the Galapagos tortoise, the Aldabra tortoise, the African spurred tortoise (Geochelone sulcata, typical size 76 cm (30 in)), the leopard tortoise (Stigmochelys pardalis), and the Asian forest tortoise (Manouria emys), typical size 60 cm (23.6 in)).

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Yellow-footed tortoise” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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