Sea turtle Sea turtle Sea turtles (superfamily Chelonioidea), sometimes called marine turtles, are reptiles of the order Testudines and of the suborder cryptodira. The seven existing species of sea turtles are: the green, loggerhead, Kemp's ridley, olive ridley, hawksbill, flatback, and leatherback. The majority of a sea turtle's body is protected by its shell. The turtle's shell is divided into two sections: the carapace (the dorsal portion) and the plastron (the ventral portion). The shell is made up of smaller plates called scutes. The leatherback is the only sea turtle that does not have a hard shell. Instead, it bears a mosaic
Varieties of Chinese their own standard languages. In China, however, Literary Chinese maintained its monopoly on formal writing until the start of the 20th century. The logographic writing, read with varying local pronunciations, continued to serve as a source of vocabulary and idioms for the local varieties. The new national standard, Vernacular Chinese, the written counterpart of spoken Standard Chinese, is also used as a literary form by speakers of all varieties. Dialectologist Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum, in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances