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For more top lists check out DISCOVER’s top 100 stories of the year and the 2010 top ten most-read stories from 80beats.

If your God was going to drop down from the heavens for a stroll around your town, what form do you think he or she would choose? A turtle, perhaps?

According to Reuters:

Hundreds of poor Hindu villagers in eastern India have refused to hand over a rare turtle to authorities, saying it is an incarnation of God, officials said on Tuesday. Villagers chanting hymns and carrying garlands, bowls of rice and fruits are pouring in from remote villages to a temple in Kendrapara, a coastal district in eastern Orissa state.

Police have been trying to take the animal from the villagers since it’s actually illegal to harbor this rare turtle. (Note: That’s not a picture of the turtle to the left. The exact species isn’t clear from news reports.) The villagers are saying the turtle has holy symbols on its shell and is really an incarnation of Lord Jagannath, a popular Hindu deity.

Let us all pray to Jagannath that this doesn’t devolve into an Elian Gonzalez-type situation, with Indian authorities barging in to grab a confused reptile…

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Image: flickr / Rennett Stowe

Soccer moms and Little League dads aren’t the only ones living the good life in the ‘burbs. Eastern long-necked turtles in the Australian suburbs are living fat and happy, according to new research in the journal Biological Conservation.

The finding came as a surprise to the research team. According to BBC News:

“We expected suburban turtles to move around less than those on the nature reserves in response to the many threats that suburban turtles could encounter, but we found the opposite,” says Dr John Roe, a member of the research team from the Institute for Applied Ecology at the University of Canberra, Australia. “Suburban turtles traveled longer distances and occupied home ranges nearly three times larger than turtles in the nature reserves.”

Seems like suburbanites are forcing McMansions and longer commutes on turtles now too.

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Image: flickr / reggie35

After you’ve shelled out a small fortune for a plane ticket, it’s always disappointing to find out your flight’s been delayed. But outgoing flights from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport weren’t running late on Wednesday morning due to weather. Instead, a horde of turtles came to shore from Jamaica Bay and took over the tarmac.

A group of 78 diamondback terrapin turtles, each weighing two to three pounds and measuring about nine inches long, spent about 35 minutes on the runway before they were removed via pickup truck. The turtles appear to be a group of females who are getting ready to lay eggs, and were looking for a place to nest en masse.

The resulting flight delays averaged about an hour and a half, according to the New York Times:

[The turtles] were originally spotted around 8:30 a.m. by a pilot, who radioed the tower.

“It’s not unprecedented, but it’s not at all common,” said [John Kelly, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey].

He said that the turtles were perhaps attracted to the sand along one side of the runway, which juts into the water. “They tend to look for sand while they are mating,” he said. “Presumably, all these turtles were feeling amorous.” It is unclear whether the turtles pair off, or if the numbers indicated it was a group activity, he said.

It’s the latest massive swarm of animals to appear in odd places: Don’t forget about the bees on the plane and the ant colony that spans the globe. Maybe they’re all becoming zombies under the control of parasites.

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Image: flickr / laogooli