๐ง They Outlived the Dinosaurs. They May Not Outlive Us. — Woody Magazine, May 23, 2026
● Edited by Woody · AI-assisted
They Outlived the Dinosaurs.
They May Not Outlive Us.
On World Turtle Day, the paradox of a 220-million-year survivor
The slowest thing about a turtle is how quickly we dismiss it.
Today is World Turtle Day, an annual observance launched in 2000 by American Tortoise Rescue, a California nonprofit. Last year's edition reached over 100 million people across more than 70 countries. Every May 23, social media fills with cute photos and conservation hashtags. But the creature at the center of all that attention is far stranger, far older, and in far more trouble than most of those posts suggest.
Turtles have been on Earth for roughly 220 million years. They predate snakes. They predate crocodilians. They were already here when dinosaurs rose, and they were still here after an asteroid wiped those dinosaurs out 66 million years ago. A study published this March in Biology Letters by a team at Germany's Bavarian State Collection of Natural History finally pinpointed why: it wasn't the shell. It was the diet. Species that fed on hard-shelled prey like gastropods and bivalves survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction largely intact. Those that relied on softer food did not. A pair of crushing jaws made the difference between survival and oblivion.
One individual turtle alive today was born around 1832. Jonathan, a Seychelles giant tortoise living on the grounds of the governor's residence on Saint Helena, a remote British island in the South Atlantic, turned 193 last December. Britannica and Guinness World Records recognize him as the oldest land animal ever documented. The light bulb, the telephone, and the automobile were all invented after he hatched. His longevity is not a fluke. A 2018 genome study of Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise who died in 2012 at roughly 100, revealed that giant tortoises possess specialized longevity genes, immune-system gene duplications, and tumor-suppressor and DNA-repair mechanisms that other vertebrates lack.
Then there is navigation. Female sea turtles return to the exact beach where they hatched to lay their own eggs, crossing thousands of miles of open ocean. Research by Kenneth Lohmann's lab at the University of North Carolina, published repeatedly in Current Biology, has shown that hatchlings imprint the magnetic signature of their natal beach at birth and use it as a biological GPS decades later. A follow-up study in February 2025 demonstrated that turtles can learn and remember the magnetic fields of new foraging sites as well. They have been reading the planet's magnetic field as a map for hundreds of millions of years, long before humans thought to launch a satellite.
"Loggerhead sea turtles begin their lives by migrating alone across the Atlantic Ocean and back. Eventually they return to nest on the beach where they hatched. The magnetic field is their home and their map."
— Kenneth Lohmann, professor of biology, UNC Chapel Hill
On August 10, 2015, off the coast of Guanacaste, Costa Rica, marine biologist Christine Figgener found an olive ridley sea turtle with something lodged in its nostril. Using pliers, her team carefully extracted a four-inch plastic drinking straw. Figgener filmed the procedure on her phone. The eight-minute video, with the turtle bleeding and writhing, went viral, eventually reaching tens of millions of viewers. It triggered plastic straw bans at Starbucks, American Airlines, and dozens of other companies. TIME named Figgener a 2018 Next Generation Leader.
That single straw was the visible tip of something much larger.
In November 2025, the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published the most comprehensive study yet on the lethal dose of plastic for marine wildlife. Led by Ocean Conservancy researchers, the paper analyzed more than 10,000 necropsies of seabirds, marine mammals, and sea turtles. Among sea turtles, 47 percent had plastic in their digestive tracts at the time of death. One in twenty died directly from plastic ingestion. The amounts required to kill were startlingly small: as few as 6 to 405 pieces, depending on the type, pushed mortality risk to 90 percent.
that produce a 50% probability of death
(Wilcox et al., 2018, Scientific Reports)
Turtles do not eat plastic by accident. They are visual feeders, selecting prey by color and shape. A 2024 study by researchers at the Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology (KIOST), published in Marine Pollution Bulletin, experimentally confirmed that sea turtles are strongly attracted to light-colored, translucent objects: the same visual profile as a jellyfish. A follow-up paper from the same research line, published in Scientific Reports this February, tested hawksbill hatchlings with single-use plastic films of various colors. The turtles overwhelmingly targeted transparent, white, and black bags. The problem is not that turtles mistake plastic for food. The problem is that millions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning have produced prey preferences that overlap precisely with the visual properties of a plastic bag.
This January, a Korean research team published findings showing that the plastic fragments found inside stranded sea turtles on South Korean shores bore printed characters from countries well beyond the turtles' migratory range. The study offered biological proof that plastic pollution respects no borders.
The IUCN's 2025 assessment places 174 of 277 formally evaluated turtle and tortoise species, or 62.8 percent, in threatened categories. Adjusting for unevaluated species raises the estimate to 58.5 percent, up from 55.9 percent in 2021.
But one species has fought its way back. Last October, at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi, the green sea turtle was reclassified from Endangered to Least Concern. Its global population has grown roughly 28 percent since the 1970s, a result of four decades of nesting-beach protections, fishing reforms, and egg-harvesting bans. Conservation took a generation to show results, but it worked. The remaining six sea turtle species, however, have not recovered. Hawksbills and Kemp's ridleys remain Critically Endangered.
On the shores of Jeju, South Korea's largest island, more than 30 sea turtle carcasses are found every year. Satellite tracking by KIOST and the National Marine Biodiversity Institute has shown that green turtles use the waters between Korea and the East China Sea, loggerheads move between Korea and Japan, and hawksbills stay close to Jeju. The Korean coastline is both a corridor and a graveyard for these 220-million-year survivors.
Susan Tellem, co-founder of American Tortoise Rescue, put it plainly this year: "Turtles survived the dinosaurs. It would be a tragedy if they couldn't survive us."
In 2015, a single straw pulled from a turtle's nose changed how the world thinks about plastic. In 2025, a PNAS study on 10,000 necropsies quantified what that straw represented: one in twenty sea turtles dies from plastic, and just 14 pieces in the gut produce a 50% chance of death. These animals survived an asteroid. They read the Earth's magnetic field like a map. What they cannot survive is a translucent bag that looks exactly like a jellyfish.
- Hermanson & Evers (2026), Biology Letters — K-Pg turtle survival and diet (phys.org)
- TIME — How Heartbreaking Turtle Video Sparked Plastic Straw Bans (2018)
- Murphy et al. (2025), PNAS — Quantitative risk assessment of macroplastic ingestion
- Wilcox et al. (2018), Scientific Reports — 14 pieces and 50% mortality
- Noh et al. (2024), Marine Pollution Bulletin — KIOST color/texture experiment
- KIOST (2026), Scientific Reports — Hawksbill hatchling behavioral responses to plastic film
- Britannica — Jonathan, world's oldest land animal (193 years)
- UNC News — Sea Turtles' Secret GPS, Lohmann lab (Feb. 2025)
- IUCN SSC TFTSG — 2025 Turtle Checklist (174/277 species threatened)
- WWF — Green turtle IUCN reclassification (Oct. 2025)
- EurekAlert — Cross-border plastic pollution in Korean sea turtles (Jan. 2026)
- Natural History Museum (UK) — Turtles: 230 million years of evolution
- Jejusori — Sea turtle strandings on Jeju coast (Nov. 2023, in Korean)
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