Could adolescent reptiles learn martial arts?

Do you need more than pizza, surf slang and bright bandanas to bring out the heroes in four juvenile turtles?

- STEPHEN KELLY

You could be forgiven for thinking that the idea of teenage turtles who mutate into humanoid ninjas is a tad far-fetched. But you may be shell-shocked to learn that actually, in reality... it is.

"First of all," says Jeanette Wyneken, professor of biological sciences at Florida Atlantic University, "the chromosomes of a turtle and of a human don't match up. Turtles have more chromosomes than we do. And if your chromosomes don't match up, you often end up with genetic abnormalities called a 'teratology', a term that literally means monsters." But let's ignore all of that.