The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Columbia Encyclopedia World Factbook American Heritage Coll.
Tortoises inhabit warm regions of all continents except Australia.
The limbs are covered with hard scales and when the limbs and head are withdrawn into the shell, the animal is completely closed off. 1 Most tortoises belong to the genus Testudo. There are about a dozen races of the Galapagos tortoise, most of them isolated on separate islands. These tortoises were a major source of meat for sailors in the 17th and 18th cent. The tortoises are now protected by law, and scientists from the Charles Darwin Research Station have bred some 2,000 and set free the different subspecies on the islands from which they came.