This piece was almost certainly made to be shown with other examples of scientific and artistic skill, and natural wonders, in a Kunstkammer. A Kunstkammer was a room (or rooms) in a large private house or palace specially reserved for the display of rare, valuable and intriguing objects, both natural and man-made, to select visitors. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, automata that incorporated mechanical clocks regularly appeared in inventories of these rooms. In this example the tortoise's head jerks in and out from under its shell as the object is rolled along. The merman on top of the shell (known as a triton) is designed to raise its arms and bring its trident down on the head of the moving tortoise. However the crude workmanship of triton and its disproportionate size in relation to the tortoise suggest it is a later alteration, and that the tortoise may originally have carried only a clock on its back.