Reptiles
Pancake Tortoise
Malacochersus tornieri · also called African pancake tortoise, crevice tortoise, softshell tortoise
Almost every tortoise answers danger the same way: pull in, hunker down, and let the shell do the work. The pancake tortoise does the opposite. Its shell is thin, flat, and full of holes — and it runs.
Overview
Malacochersus tornieri lives on isolated rocky hills in Tanzania and Kenya, in arid savanna. It is small — about 15–18 cm and only 450 g — with a flattened, flexible shell whose bony plates have large gaps, making it light and slightly springy instead of a solid dome.
Speed over armour
Threatened, the pancake tortoise does not withdraw and wait. It sprints to the nearest horizontal rock crack and pushes in, and its flat shape carries it into spaces a domed tortoise could never enter. It climbs near-vertical rock and rights itself easily if flipped.
A rock-pile life
Each tortoise lives in a loose colony on a single kopje, faithful to particular crevices for years. The female lays just one egg at a time — among the lowest reproductive rates of any tortoise.
Status
The pancake tortoise is Critically Endangered and declining. Decades of collection for the pet trade, plus habitat loss, emptied outcrops that its single-egg breeding cannot refill. It was moved to the strictest CITES protection in 2019.
Pancake Tortoise: common questions
Why is the pancake tortoise's shell soft and flat?
It is not soft exactly; the shell is still made of bone and keratin, but the bony plates that would normally fuse into a thick solid dome instead have wide openings between them, so the whole structure is thin, light, and able to flex a little. This is the opposite of the usual tortoise strategy of being an impregnable box. A pancake tortoise trades armour for mobility. Being light and flat lets it move fast over and between rocks, climb well, squeeze into narrow crevices, and flip itself back over easily. In its rocky habitat, getting out of reach beats being hard to bite.
Does the pancake tortoise really wedge itself into cracks?
It does hide deep in horizontal rock crevices, and older accounts claimed it inflates its body or braces its legs to lock itself in place so tightly that it cannot be pulled out. More recent observation suggests the wedging is less dramatic than that; the main defence is simply getting far back into a tight space that a mongoose, jackal, or bird of prey cannot enter or reach into, helped by the flat shell and the tortoise's ability to brace against the rock. Either way, a pancake tortoise in its crevice is very hard for a predator, or a person, to extract.
Why is it Critically Endangered?
Two pressures acting on a species with almost no capacity to bounce back. First, collection for the pet trade; the odd flat shell makes it desirable, and for decades large numbers were taken from the wild and exported, stripping many outcrops. Second, habitat loss and degradation, as the rocky hill country is cleared and grazed and as rocks are removed for building. Because each female produces only a single egg at a time and the tortoises are confined to specific isolated outcrops with no way to recolonise once wiped out locally, even modest collecting empties a population that then stays empty. In 2019 the species was uplisted to CITES Appendix I, banning commercial international trade in wild-caught animals.
Can pancake tortoises be kept as pets?
They are kept, and captive breeding has improved, but they are a specialist animal and wild-caught individuals should never be bought. They need a warm, dry enclosure with a stack of flat rocks or slate arranged to make tight crevices they can climb into, good UVB, a grass-and-weed diet, and low humidity. They are active and entertaining by tortoise standards, climbing and exploring rather than plodding. Anyone considering one should insist on a captive-bred animal with paperwork, both because of the law and because the wild populations cannot spare any more.