Do Tortoises Have Teeth? (with Pictures and Video)

Have you ever wondered if tortoises have teeth? Because I have, so I decided to take a quick look at my tortoise and see if that’s the case. But by now I know that tortoises can be very different so I decided to do some research, and the results were amazing.

Tortoises don’t have any teeth, instead, they have a beak to bite and chew their food. Baby tortoises are born with an egg tooth, but this tooth is different from human teeth and it disappears after a few days.

But as you might have expected not all tortoise beaks are the same, some of them have pointy sharp beaks, others have a saw-like beak, and other tortoises have their mouth full of spikes. So let’s have a closer look at tortoises and the different types of mouths that they can have.

How Tortoises Chew Their Food

Tortoises don’t have teeth, instead, they have beaks, just like birds. And they use those beaks to bite chunks of their food and eat it. Unlike most animals with teeth, tortoises don’t need to chew their food too much, so they just bite small bits that they can swallow without any effort.

Here is a photo that shows close-ups of a tortoise beak, and a sea gull’s beak.

And here is a video of a very young tortoise using its beak to eat a strawberry.

While the tortoise in the video didn’t seem too successful at biting the strawberry, that’s not the case for most full-grown adult tortoises.

At the beginning of the article I mentioned that depending on what they eat tortoises will have different types of mouths, so let’s take a look at those mouths and see why they are different.

The Different Types of Tortoise Mouths

Tortoises are one of the most adaptive species on Earth, so it’s not hard to imagine that based on their diet they managed to adjust the shape of their beaks to better suit their needs.

Carnivorous Tortoises

Tortoises that are carnivorous will have a diet that consists mostly of meat, so they will need a beak that will be able to pierce through skin and be able to break chunks of meat. And as a result, most carnivorous tortoises have pointy and sharp beaks, like the one in this picture.

Herbivorous Tortoises

Herbivorous tortoises have a diet that is based mostly on plant matter, so they will eat a lot of fruits, vegetables, and vegetation. And as a result, they don’t have a need for sharp beaks, instead, they need a stronger beak that can cut through most plants. Some herbivorous tortoises even have small ridges on their beaks, that help them cut the plants.

Omnivorous Tortoises

Omnivorous tortoises eat both meat and plants, so they will need a beak that is able to do a good job in every situation. So they basically have a combination of the two previous types.

Sea Tortoises Mouths

One other type of mouth that I want to cover is the sea tortoises’ mouths. While there are 7 different species of sea tortoises, some of them, especially the leatherback sea tortoise, can have really scary mouths, like the one in this picture.

Leatherback sea tortoises are the biggest consumers of jellyfish in the world. And as we all know jellyfish can really sting, so imagine what would happen to a sea tortoise if it were to eat one. This is why they have those scary spikes, to protect themselves from the sting of the jellyfish.

While this picture can look really scary, this doesn’t change the fact that leatherback sea tortoises are a cornerstone species of this world. This means that they are an essential animal in this world, and without it, the world would change drastically in a bad way. Leatherback sea tortoises are also the biggest tortoises in the world, even bigger than the famous Galapagos tortoises. But let’s not get off the subject right now. If you want to know more about leatherback sea tortoises, and how they protect the entire world you should read my article: The Biggest Tortoise in the World (Facts, Photos, and Videos).

Now, there is one more type of tortoise to cover, the one that has teeth.

Baby Tortoises Teeth

The closest of all tortoises, to having teeth are babies. While they don’t have too many teeth, and they are not made out of the same material as most teeth, they can be considered teeth.

Baby tortoises are born with an egg tooth. It’s called this way because all tortoises are born with one, and they use it to break the shell of the egg so that they can get out. After that, they will shortly lose it.

Here is a video that shows multiple tortoises getting out of their eggs. In this video, you can spot multiple tortoises that have egg teeth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg3DNNgDsCE

If Tortoises Don’t Have Teeth Are Their Bites Dangerous?

When we talk about how powerful and dangerous a tortoise bite is we have to look at the factors that influence the bite. There are a lot of tortoise species, and they are quite different, even individuals in the same species can be quite different, so it will be kind of pointless to talk directly about species, instead, we are going to look at the following things: the diet and the size.

The diet. If you want to find out if a tortoise’s bite will be powerful or not, the first thing that you want to know is if it eats meat or not. As we’ve discussed, tortoises and tortoises that eat meat have sharper beaks that can be a lot more dangerous than those that are not sharp.

The size is a very important factor as well, the bigger the tortoise the more muscles it will have, the bigger the jews will be, so the bite will grow in power along with the tortoise.

At the moment there is no scientific data available about the bite force of a tortoise, the only data I could find is about snapping tortoises. If you want to know more about that you can read my article right here: Are Snapping Turtles Dangerous? (with Bite Facts and Videos), in this article, as the title implies, I talk about how dangerous snapping tortoises are, I give more information about their bite, and I also explore the reasons why they are a lot more aggressive than other tortoise species. If you are interested to find out you should check the article out.

My Own Personal Experience With Tortoise Bites

Even If I couldn’t find any reliable information about the power of a tortoise bite, I can still tell you about my first-hand experiences with tortoises bites.

Before telling you how the bites feel, let me tell you how big my tortoise is and what diet it has. This way you will have a better understanding of how those factors come into play. My box tortoise is 6 inches and it has a diet that includes meat, fruits, and vegetables.

In general box tortoise bites are not that bad, but the amount of pain you will feel depends on the area that was bitten. The most common places you can get bitten by a tortoise are your fingers and your toes. The fingers can get accidentally bitten when you feed them with your hand. And if you keep your tortoises in an outdoor enclosure and you walk through it with slippers on you can expect them to bite you thinking that your toes are food.

When your fingers get bitten by a box tortoise you won’t feel too much pain or any kind of discomfort. You will feel a little pain but nothing too bad. You can probably expect to have your skin turn red for a few minutes, but that is usually all.

If a box tortoise bites your toe then you will feel about the same amount of pain that you would feel if you were to hit your toe in the table’s foot, and the pain goes away just as fast. It can sometimes leave a few bruises but they should probably go in a few hours, or in a couple of days in the worst-case scenario.

For this article I also let my box tortoise bite my forearm, the pain was a little worse than the rest of them, but nothing that bad. It left me with a few signs, but they went away shortly after.

My box tortoise was a full-grown adult when he bit me, so a bite shouldn’t normally be more powerful than the one I experienced. If a smaller box tortoise bites you you should experience even less discomfort.

Overall I would say that the pain you feel when your box tortoise bites your finger is the same pain you will feel if you were to bite your finger, it’s not unbearable, it’s more of a discomfort. The biggest difference between when you bite your own finger intentionally, and when a tortoise bites your finger is that you didn’t expect that. Over time I kind of got used to the idea that I can get bitten by them, so the pain started to be less significant, and I personally think this is because the element of surprise is starting to go away.

So even if they don’t have teeth, their bites are not necessarily pleasant. But if you want to see a really dangerous tortoise bite you should check out my article: Are Snapping Turtles Dangerous? (with Bite Facts and Videos), there you will also find a video of a snapping tortoise biting someone’s hand (everything happens under controlled circumstances).