Do Turtles Have Teeth? (with Pictures and Video)

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

Turtles don’t have any teeth, instead, they have a beak to bite and chew their food. Baby turtles 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 turtle beaks are the same, some of them have pointy sharp beaks, others have a saw-like beak, and other turtles have their mouth full of spikes. So let’s have a closer look at turtles and the different types of mouths that they can have.

How Turtles Chew Their Food

Turtles 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, turtles 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 turtle beak, and a sea gull’s beak.

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

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

At the beginning of the article I mentioned that depending on what they eat turtles 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 Turtle Mouths

Turtles 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 Turtles

Turtles 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 turtles have pointy and sharp beaks, like the one in this picture.

Herbivorous Turtles

Herbivorous turtles 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 turtles even have small ridges on their beaks, that help them cut the plants.

Omnivorous Turtles

Omnivorous turtles 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 Turtles Mouths

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

Leatherback sea turtles 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 turtle 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 turtles 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 turtles are also the biggest turtles 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 turtles, and how they protect the entire world you should read my article: The Biggest Turtle in the World (Facts, Photos, and Videos).

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

Baby Turtles Teeth

The closest of all turtles, 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 turtles are born with an egg teeth. It’s called this way because all turtles 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 turtles getting out of their eggs. In this video, you can spot multiple turtles that have egg teeth.

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

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

When we talk about how powerful and dangerous a turtle bite is we have to look at the factors that influence the bite. There are a lot of turtle 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 turtle’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, turtles and turtles 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 turtle the more muscles it will have, the bigger the jews will be, so the bite will grow in power along with the turtle.

At the moment there is no scientific data available about the bite force of a turtle, the only data I could find is about snapping turtles. 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 turtles are, I give more information about their bite, and I also explore the reasons why they are a lot more aggressive than other turtle species. If you are interested to find out you should check the article out.

My Own Personal Experience With Turtle Bites

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

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

In general box turtle 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 turtle are your fingers and your toes. The fingers can get accidentally bitten when you feed them with your hand. And if you keep your turtles 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 turtle 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 turtle 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 turtle 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 turtle 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 turtle bites you you should experience even less discomfort.

Overall I would say that the pain you feel when your box turtle 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 turtle 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 turtle 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 turtle biting someone’s hand (everything happens under controlled circumstances).