Twenty Tortoises.

Without the wallabies! Pliny! Without the wallabies your story takes on a different significance. Let us imagine. You are driving through the countryside. Someone says "Look! Pademelons!". You see nothing but a few wild melons and assume wrongly that these are pademelons.

But it is your informant who is responsible for the error.

However, let me not be picky about that . Today my subject is the Twenty Tortoises.

I see from the newspaper that this week twenty tortoises were returned to the Goolwa wetlands after months of rehabilitation, during which volunteers cleaned infestations of potentially fatal tube worms from their shells. The incrusted tortoises looked like iced cakes, or sponges. The cleaned up tortoises looked like.....TURTLES!

Even Pliny the Elder knows the difference between tortoises and turtles.