the.com/terrapin
a brackish-water turtle that grills hate so much it built a college mascot empire instead.
means A small to medium freshwater or brackish-water turtle, especially the diamondback terrapin of North America's coastal marshes.
from From an Algonquian language of the eastern seaboard — likely Powhatan, where a word like 'torope' named the local turtle. English colonists borrowed it and reshaped it into 'terrapin,' a souvenir of the marshes between fresh and salt where the creature lives. So unlike 'turtle' (a Romance import) or 'tortoise' (Latin by way of French), terrapin is one of the relatively few English animal names handed over directly from the Indigenous peoples of the New World.
- name origin
- From Algonquian word meaning little turtle
- habitat
- Lives only in coastal salt marshes
- salt gland
- Special glands let it drink seawater
- near extinction
- Once hunted nearly to death for soup
- sex by heat
- Egg temperature decides if hatchlings are male or female
maryland terrapin — university of maryland's athletics mascot and teams since 1933
diamondback terrapin — species native to coastal areas of eastern north america from cape cod to texas