Finally tonight, a story about new insights into one of Earth's most ancient living creatures, sea turtles.

It's tiny flippers churning sand, this newly hatched sea turtle heads toward the ocean, just as generations of its ancestors have done for more than a hundred million years.

Considered one of the oldest living species on Earth,

it's been a mystery where baby sea turtles go after heading out to sea. It's known as their lost

years. Because we don't have that information, it's really hard for us to develop management

plans and conservation measures to best protect these animals.

Kate Mansfield and the team of marine scientists, she leads at the University of Central Florida,

are working to change that. The breakthrough came after the attached specially sized geolocator devices

to 114 wild sea turtles shells in the waters off the Gulf Coast.

This is a standard satellite tag for larger animals, and this is bigger than some baby hatchlings.

So we needed something that was smaller.

Here's one, and here's the other.

They're ideal candidates for something that can recharge over time and allow us to figure out their locations without hurting them.

For more than a decade, they tracked young sea turtles' whereabouts

to better understand their migration patterns.

The data Mansfield's team collected revealed that in just a few months, the turtles traveled

more than a thousand miles, swimming between relatively shallow waters closer to shore and the deep

open ocean. A much wider area than scientists had previously thought. We ended up realizing that

these are animals that are actively swimming some of the time. And that means that they may not

be passively drifting and entrained within an area that could be impacted by human activities,

like an oil spill.

Mansfield says the research will help federal agencies like the National Marine Fisheries Service

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