One late summer day in 1961 a biologist named Sherman Bleakney

Got a telephone call about a strange sea creature that fishermen had just unloaded on a wharf in Halifax,Nova Scotia.who lived nearby,was captived by what he found there.Sprawled on its back amid a curious crowd was an immense black sea turtle tipping the scale at 900 pounds.
with a soft,rubbery cara-pace.winglike front flippers,and a massive,conical head like an artillery shell.Bleakney recognized it as a leatherback,the biggest of all sea turtles,Leatherbacks,he recalled,were supposed to be creatures of the tropics,as out of place in chilly,gray Canadian waters as parrots in a Halifax park.When Bleakney began asking around,though,he learned that fishermen saw leatherbacks swimming in the waters off maritime Canada regularly enough to call late summer turtle season.The conclusion was inescapable,he wrote in 1965.Evidently there is an annual invasion of our cool Atlantic coastal waters by trutles of tropical origin,Their southern roots were obvious from the few dead trutles he examined.One had a twig from a tropical mangrove tree stuck in its eye.others carried warm-water barnacles.Yet the leatherbacks were surviving,even flourishing,at temperatures that would kill other sea trutles.Stranger still was what he found inside them.Their huge stomachs contained masses of chewed-up jellyfish,stinging tentacles and all,and their gullets were lined with three-inch spines.angled inward to hold in all that slippery prey.