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All animals—big and small—deserve to live their best life. So when a wood turtle named Root showed up at the Museum of Natural History in Halifax, Nova Scotia, missing his right foot, the staff got creative. They built him a tiny mobility aid out of LEGO to help him move around more easily.
Root arrived at the museum in September 2024, but he hasn’t lived in the wild for nearly 20 years. The turtle was originally rescued by staff from the Department of Natural Resources, who wanted to give him a better life despite his disability. He spent most of his years at Oaklawn Farm Zoo in Aylesford, and, after the zoo closed at the end of 2023, he went to the Shubenacadie Wildlife Park.
However, Root was a bit too bossy with the other turtles—hogging the food and scaring them off—so the staff decided to find him a new home at the museum. Today, Root spends most of his time in his enclosure, where he can safely explore his surroundings. The staff at the museum also takes him out for walks multiple times a week.
When Root arrived at the museum, the staff noticed that the turtle was scraping his plastron, or bottom shell, on the floor when he walked. “Because one leg is essentially shorter than the other one, we found that he was kind of clunking his shell down,” says Heather McKinnon Ramshaw, the museum’s animal care specialist. “There was some wear on the shell and we didn’t want it to get worse, so he needed something to lift him up.”
While the museum was hosting a LEGO exhibition, Tessa Biesterfeld, a naturalist interpreter, came up with the creative idea to build a wheeled platform out of LEGO pieces to lift Root slightly off the ground, helping protect his shell from damage. Biesterfeld attached the LEGO platform to a small dog harness, allowing the mobility aid to fit around Root’s body. Biesterfeld explains, “We thought that’d be so great because we know it’s non-toxic, we know that we can replace the parts as we need, and should his shell change or grow, we can change the shape and size of that. It’s very modular.”
Root quickly got used to his new get-up, and now associates the make-shift mobility aid with the joy of zooming around the museum. “Now when I snap his harness on, it’s like when he hears that snap, he’s ready to go,” says Biesterfeld. “We didn’t want to make a skateboard or make anything that would just have him zooming too unnaturally fast, but he’s clearly going a little faster than the average wood turtle but he seems happy to do so. He’s getting lots of great exercise.”
Wood turtles, a species at risk in Nova Scotia, can live anywhere from 50 to 80 years. “We might have him for a while,” says McKinnon, “so we want to make sure he’s comfortable.”
When a disabled wood turtle named Root moved into the Museum of Natural History in Halifax, the staff built him a tiny mobility aid out of LEGO to help him move around more easily.
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Source: Meet Root, the turtle with a mobility aid made of Lego
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