The Turtles' Species
 

There are around 300 species of turtles in the world. That makes me wonder what kind of turtles our Heroes in a Half Shell are.

In the IDW comics, they appear to be sea turtles due to the slippers. Now we just 7 or 8 species to choose from.

Now in the 1990 and 2014 films, they seem to use real turtles for the pre-mutated forms. Can anyone identify the species in each one?

They are Red-Eared Sliders.


For a more in-depth answer. They are RES in Mirage Comics, first LA movies (probably including NM and 07), PD movies (verbally referred to as Box Turtles, but they used RES in-footage), in Nick they are either Sliders (RES) or Diamondbacks iirc (a hypotheses by Don in episode 1 or 2)

In IDw the original sketches show them as generic turtles, but drawn as Sea Turtles which seems like an error then a confirmation considering it's illegal to have Sea Turtles, and the potential hubb-bubb Stockman had to go through to get Sea Turtles then just store bought pets.

In FW their species is not mentioned and all depictions as a pre-mutated turtle is very generic and cartoony (although the new Mega Blok/Construx have some RES looking minifigs in the Mutation packs)

Seconded. They have always been shown as or at least implied to be Sliders. Being bought in a pet shop, that is the most logical species for them to be. And 90 LA films, TNM, Mirage, and PDMNT all visually cnfirm this. IDW just looks like a generic artistically liberal interpretation of a turtle. The artist probably googled turtle pics and a sea turtle was the first thing that came up.

I'm not sure......
 

Forgive my ignorance, but whenever I looked for the species of the TMNT I found the term "Terrapin", which referred to the turtles of fresh water. Terrapin is a generic term?

Kind of. Terrapin is a name used to describe a type of turtle that spends time on land and in fresh or brackish water.

Many use the word loosely to talk about any random turtle, though, so if you really wanted to know if a certain turtle is a terrapin or not, you'd have to research it.

Most versions are red-eared sliders, but there are a few ambiguous exceptions. As for IDW I refuse to believe those are red eared sliders. I saw flippers in the art, so until there is official confirmation, I believe those turtles have flippers. They are either fresh water pig nose turtles from Indonesia, or in the IDW universe there exists another freshwater breed of turtle with flippers we don't have in the real world, or sea turtles can be easily picked up at a pet store on the IDW turtles earth.

What? Diamondback terrapins don't look anything at all like what the Nick TMNT look like, they're usually white or gray/black, with a shell pattern and face markings Nick's version just don't have:


Nick:


As far as IdW, yeah these guys couldn't have been RES:

It's probably best not to worry about the Turtle's species, and just think of them as made up species'.

And my theory is the IDW tmnt are a fictional breed of freshwater turtle with flippers that only exist in the IDW-verse.

Let's see here, we can cross the Mirage comics and all the movies off as red-eared sliders. The rest can be a little tricky, so let's analyse some pictures and videos:


In the Fred Wolf cartoon they don't seem to crawl along the ground and their heads/necks are clearly. They don't seem to have webbed feet or flippers either. So I would say they're some kind of tortoise. Given their pet store origin, I'd say they're probably the most common species of tortoise found in pet stores (whichever that may be).


In the 4Kids cartoon, they seem pretty similar to the Fred Wolf cartoon. I'd say they're probably a common pet tortoise as well.


The Nicktoon... Ditto, probably even more obvious.


Now in the Archie version it seems unclear but I guess they look more like fresh water turtles?


In Dreamwave's comics they are... Tortoises, there's really no doubt about that... Freaky looking but no doubt tortoises...


Now IDW does something interesting, they are in fact some kind of sea turtle. Let's see now, kept in a small tank so they were probably not expect to grow too much, light green skin with dark green shell, kept in a lab taking orders from an island in the atlantic...

It doesn't fit all the requirements but my best guess is this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemp%2...ley_sea_turtle

RES seems like a good bet but have we actually seen the "red ears?"

Terrapin is a catch-all name for semi-aquatic turtles, but it's not a taxonomic unit as it includes members of both Emydidae and Geoemydidae.

A lot of turtles also have "Terrapin" in their common name. But, depending on where you live it's often referred to a specific turtle. Like, in the US, the Diamondback Terrapin is often referred to just as Terrapin. While in UK and other countries in Europe, Terrapin is often the common name for the Pond Slider, so a Red-Eared Slider is called a Red-Eared Terrapin and so on.

I agree with Candy Kappa- each version interprets it slightly differently, but in nearly all versions they were orininally bought in a pet shop. That rules out sea turtles and most tortoises by default as sea turtles are NOT sold as pets- it's illegal and they get too big to house in most aquariums anyway. That makes IDW's visual depiction an error. In fact those CAN'T be sea turtles as they are in the wrong kind of environment in the comic! Sea turtles spend their ENTIRE lives in deep oceans while those were being kept in an obviously semi-aquatic freshwater terrerium with mostly dirt and plants and just a small "pool" to swim in. Sea turtles could not survive that environment. They are most likely just a very vague depiction of a common pet turtle. (The flippers were probably just intended to be webbed feet but the artist didn't feel like drawing all the details. You can also see that they have FULL shells- sea turtle shells don't cover the entire body and they cannot retract into them, unlike freshwater or land turtles or tortoises.) Nick is iffy, but since Splinter specifically states he bought them in a pet shop, they are most likely either sliders or diamondbacks or possibly a box turtle.

Archie and OT use the same origin, with human Yoshi ending up with store-bought pet turtles, which again narrows the list to coomon pet species. Since red-ears are the cheapest and easiest to find, they are the most likely choice in each case. I might add that in the 80's when the OT aired, red-ears were the most common pet species and were often sold VERY cheaply($5 or less in some shops) so the kid who bought them probably bought sliders as they would have been cheap. I highly doubt a parent would let their kid spend more than 20$ on pet turtles, so red-ears make the most sense.

I see....
 

I see ... but then, if terrapin is a generic term, which Eastman or Laird already mentioned about it? Or it was never worthy of mention?

I pm'ed Bobby about this, and he said Stockgen is a a rich company, and could afford to purchase exotic turtles, regardless of legality. And yes, the IDW turtles did have flippers, wither or not they are sea turtles, or even a real-world species, remains to be seen.

Seems kinda stupid on Stockman's part having interns/employees clueless about his dubious schemes working around Sea Turtles which are illegal to own and all species of Sea Turtles are CITES Appendix I classified. And on top of that having them in a enclosure that will kill them quickly and probably ruin his Turtle Armor project.

Especially when he can go to the pet shop around the corner and get some turtles that isn't redlisted as Critically Endangered to Vulnerable.

I know Sacks was dumb enough to not even tell the difference between a RES and a Boxie, but I guess Baxter is a special kind of dumb :lol:

Turtles, Turtles Everywhere
 

They seem to be Galápagos Islands turtle sea turtles from Ecuador in the 1987–1996 animated TV-series, because Michaelangelo said that turtle reminded of his mother in "Turtles, Turtles Everywhere"

Just my two cents after stumbling upon this discussion: artistic interpretation aside, no way can the IDW Turtles have started their (second) life as sea turtles. Slash, who is a mutated alligator snapping turtle, would never be mistaken for one of the brothers even if he were the same size, and snapping turtles have far more in common with RES or other commonly available pet turtle species than they do with sea turtles. A mutant sea turtle would be similarly unmistakeable from a pet species.

As others have stated, it's a bad idea to keep sea turtles, baby or otherwise, in a terrarium if you're expecting to grow into useful lab "rats". Feeding them lettuce can't be good in the long term either... Not to mention, if they were mutated sea turtles, the four brothers would be vastly different in aspect and abilities. Someone's already mentioned the shell aspect of their anatomy, but there's also the fact that they would be equally at home in a marine environment as Bludgeon or Ray, and I don't see that happening any time soon.