2428 



TORTOISES, TURTLES, AND PLESIOSAURS 



side of the United States, from Maine to Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Frequent- 

 ing both marshes and rivers, it leaves the water for much longer periods than its 

 European congeners, and is sometimes found for months at a time in perfectly dry 

 places. In wandering from one stream to another, it makes regular tracks through 

 the woods, and is hence frequently termed in America the wood terrapin. In its 

 feeding and general mode of life, this terrapin presents no features distinguishing it 

 from other carnivorous kinds. 



SCULPTURED TERRAPIN. 

 (Two-fifths natural size.) 



Nearly allied to the preceding is the thick-necked terrapin (Bcllia 

 Terrapin frass ^ co ^ fs ) from Tenasserim, Siam, the Malay Peninsula, and Sumatra, 

 which, with a second species from Borneo, constitutes a genus dis- 

 tinguished by the greater development of the bony buttresses connecting the upper 

 with the lower shell, and by the hinder part of the head being covered with small 

 horny shields. The feet are fully webbed, and the anterior vertebral shields of the 

 carapace are more or less distinctly balloon shaped. The typical species measures 

 rather more than six and one-half inches in length, and is of a general dark brown 

 or black color, usually with some yellow markings on the plastron, and some 

 large spots of the same color on the head. Several representatives of this 

 genus are met with in a fossil state in the Pliocene deposits of Northwestern 

 India. 



