Meet Chonkosaurus, the internet’s famous snapping turtle

“Look at that beast!” exclaims Joey Santore, a botanist and popular YouTuber, in a recent video posted to Twitter.

Santore was kayaking on the Chicago River near Division Street and the east side of Goose Island when he spotted a rather imposing common snapping turtle likely sunning himself on a bed of rusted chains.

“You look good, I’m real proud of you!” Santore jokingly calls out as he drifts past the hefty reptile.

Since the video was posted, the internet has gone gaga for the animal, which Santore nicknamed “Chonkosaurus” due to its size. Turtle expert Jordan Gray estimates the snapper weighs around 40 pounds—a pretty impressive weight for a common snapping turtle.

“Common snapping turtles can live up to and over a hundred years old,” says Gray, a turtle biologist and education coordinator for the South Carolina-based nonprofit Turtle Survival Alliance.

Chonkosaurus also “appears to be an old male. I can tell just by the rounding of the snout and the wear on its carapace, or top shell,” he says. The cloaca, or its all-purpose hole, is also situated away from the center of the body. Gray adds the animal is also notable because it’s bloated, either from being ill or overfed.

So, what the herp is a large reptile doing lounging in one of the most heavily populated cities in the United States? Especially within a waterbody historically known for being lousy with pollution?

The Chicago River “was used as an industrial toilet for the last century and a half,” Santore told National Geographic. “It had a notorious smell, probably from all the sewage runoff causing algal blooms.”

But the fact that there are snappers there now means efforts to clean up the waterway are working. Gray also noted that common snapping turtles are surprisingly resilient and able to persist in polluted areas.

“It’s great, and it proves something I’ve known all along,” says Santore. “If you clean things up and you start planting native plants… all the native wildlife comes back.”

“Vultures of our water bodies”

While the common snapping turtle and its powerful bite have a reputation for eagerly lopping off a human finger with ease, Gray says, “They’re not an animal to be scared of—at all.”

In fact, Gray says he’s snorkeled in waters full of common snapping turtles many times without incident. Sometimes, they have even swam peacefully between his legs. (See 17 surprisingly cute photos of turtles.)

“Their immediate instinct is to get away, to take off and hide,” he explains.

Of course, this isn’t to say the animals are harmless.

“The most precarious time to be around a common snapping turtle is when it is out of the water, because they feel vulnerable,” says Gray. “And so when they are approached by humans out of the water, they can turn quickly, and snap quickly.”

But such behaviors are purely defensive and unlikely to occur if you give the animal its space.

Interestingly, though common snapping turtles have a sharp, curved beak which can be used for hunting small fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and crustaceans, a large and underappreciated portion of their diet comes from dead animals. In fact, those beaks are built for tearing apart rotting flesh—not nipping off swimmers’ toes.

As scavengers of carrion, common snapping turtles play a critical role in maintaining the health of our waterways. (Read why rivers and lakes are the most degraded ecosystems in the world.)

“They act as a cleaning mechanism, feeding on dead fish and other animals,” says Gray. “They are the vultures of our water bodies.”

Hiding in plain sight

The common snapping turtle is plentiful across a gigantic swath of freshwater habitats in the central and eastern U.S., as well as southern Canada.

So common snapping turtles are all around us—even if we don’t often notice them.

A prime reason for that, says Gray, is that these snappers do a lot of their foraging at night. The reptiles can also hold their breath for up to three hours at a time, and prefer to stay submerged.

In the southern U.S., common snapping turtles are active year-round, says Gray, but each spring in the north, there’s a spike in sightings because the animals are coming out of their winter dormancy and moving around more.

To experience more urban wildlife, Santore suggests killing your lawn, planting native plants, and encouraging your cities and neighborhoods to do the same.

“You don’t need to go to a zoo or five hours out of town to enjoy nature,” says Santore. “You can enjoy it in your backyard.”