As a box turtle, you know you come from an impressively ancient lineage.
200 million years is nothing to sneeze at.
Even better, you’ve picked up some eminently practical and, frankly, pretty fabulous specialized skills along your evolutionary journey.
Take neck retraction, for instance. It took joining an interspecies flock to realize not every being can do this. In fact, most beings can’t – and your earliest ancestors couldn’t do it either.
But along the way you figured some things out.
Specifically, you experimented with neck muscle design, discovering that folding your neck muscles vertically (instead of the boring normal horizontal way) could accomplish two goals:
- Make it easier to protect that valuable real estate sitting on top of your neck – your head, of course.
- Improve your “stealth hunting” skills by shooting your compressed neck out to quickly capture your unsuspecting lunch!
As an evolutionary “specialist,” these new skills ensured you would continue to dominate the cold-blooded lineup until you could fine-tune your most powerful survival weapon yet, which of course is….”cuteness.”
