Endangered
African spurred tortoise
Centrochelys sulcata
African spurred tortoise is a tortoise in the family Testudinidae — Centrochelys sulcata, recorded as Endangered and tied to Egypt, Algeria, and Chad.
The tortoise
African spurred tortoise is a tortoise in the family Testudinidae — Centrochelys sulcata.
Range and habitat
The African spurred tortoise is native to the Sahara Desert and the Sahel, a transitional ecoregion of semiarid grasslands, savannas, and thorn shrublands found in the countries of Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and possibly in Somalia, Algeria, Benin, and Cameroon. Sulcata tortoises found in the Sudanese part of their range may reach significantly greater size at maturity than those found in other regions. The African spurred tortoise, also called the sulcata tortoise, is an endangered species of tortoise inhabiting the southern edge of the Sahara Desert and the Sahel.
It is the largest mainland species of tortoise in Africa, and the third-largest in the world, after the Galapagos tortoise and Aldabra giant tortoise.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
In crisis
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
African spurred tortoise is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on African spurred tortoise, Wikidata item Q301016. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
