What do you think of when you hear the word “tortoise”? The giant tortoises that lumber along like tanks over the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean? The gopher ...

It would be a memorable sight. But it would also be so wrong to tip over Galápagos giant tortoises to see how shell shape affects their efforts to leg-pump, neck-stretch and rock right-side up again.

Conservationists are using new technology to study what eats the slow-moving critters–and then tricking those predators into stopping. A team in the South Western U.S. is using 3-D printed tortoise ...