Although they are air-breathing animals born on land, leatherbacks, like all sea turtles, spend their lives in the ocean.
Females return to land only to lay their eggs.
The leatherback is the largest sea turtle. The leatherback gets its name from its shell, which is like a thick leathery skin, with the texture of hard rubber. It is a circumglobal species, meaning that it can range throughout almost all the oceans of the world. It nests on tropical beaches in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. Once abundant throughout the world's oceans, all eight species of sea turtles are now threatened or endangered.