The 2,000-pound leatherback is the fourth-largest reptile. Leatherback turtles can grow up to eight feet long. Unlike other reptiles, leatherback turtles use thermoregulation to warm up or cool down.

For most sea turtles, the journey to find the ocean from their nests is pretty straightforward. However, leatherback hatchlings more often crawl around in circles trying to find the ocean. Circling ...

A study shows nest temperatures affect leatherback hatchling shape, performance and nest success. Lower temperatures produced longer hatchlings; highest temperatures produced hatchlings with thicker ...

For the first time in years, leatherbacks have returned to nest in significant numbers on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. These gargantuan sea turtles look like behemoths from a bygone age, which ...

In 2026, biologists at Cape Hatteras National Seashore have already found four nests from endangered leatherback sea turtles.

This story appears in the May 2009 issue of National Geographic magazine. One late summer day in 1961 a biologist named Sherman Bleakney got a telephone call about a strange sea creature that ...

Leatherback turtles are highly vulnerable to getting entangled in lobster pot fishing gear off the coast of Massachusetts. A new study now shows that they can largely survive these entanglements — if ...

Sea turtles have been around since the time of the dinosaurs, having survived multiple extinction events over 100 million years. But the cascading effects of human activity have caused rapid ...

Leatherback Turtles Are the Largest Sea Turtles There are seven species of sea turtles found in oceans around the world. Of the seven, the leatherback is the largest. Leatherback sea turtles are ...

Leatherback sea turtles start life the same size as other sea turtles. As they age, however, they grow progressively larger. These giants of the reptile world are relics from the Late Triassic and the ...