Hydrodamalis gigas (Steller's Seacow)

[another specialist]

thanks for the links Peter - i'll have a look later

[Melanie]

Another species Steller discovered is also
extinct, the Steller's s ea cow (Hydrodamalis
gigas). A small population of sea cows lived
in the arctic waters around Bering Island and
nearby Copper Island. Far larger than the
largest male walrus, Steller's sea cows
measured up to 25 feet long and 22 feet
around. A single animal weighed up to 8,800
pounds. A sea cow looked somewhat like a
large seal, but had two stout forelimbs and a
whalelike
tail. According to Steller's
description, "The animal never comes out on
shore, but always lives in the water. Its skin is
black and thick, like the bark of an old oak...,
its head in proportion to the body is small..., it
has no teeth, but only two flat white bones—
one above, the other below." These animals
fed on a variety of kelp. Wherever sea cows
had been feeding, heaps of stalks and roots of
kelp were washed ashore.
The population of sea cows was likely small
when Steller first described the giant
creatures. Some scientists think the entire
population included fewer than 2,000 animals,
all of which lived around Bering and Copper
islands. This small population was wiped out
quickly by the sailors, seal hunters, and fur
traders that followed Vitus Bering's route past
the islands to Alaska. These people killed the
cows primarily for food and their skins, which
were used to make boats. As a result of
unlimited killing, the Steller's s ea cow
population declined sharply. In 1768, just 27
years after Steller first described the sea cow,
the species became extinct. Today, the sea
cow seems an almost imaginary creature, but
Steller's descriptions and a few intact
skeletons and pieces of skin, preserved in
museums, prove that this amazing animal
lived in the Bering Sea just over 200 years
ago.
Sadly, some of the closest relatives of the
Steller's sea cow, the Florida manatee and the
dugong, are endangered today. These species'
populations are declining as a result of
pollution, deaths caused by the propellers of
outboard motors, and habitat loss caused by
human development.

baldwinets.tripod.com/sms/cormorant.pdf

[another specialist]

All in my photobucket album but all original sources stated aswell



www.amiq.org/galleries/seacow/seacow.html



www1.odn.ne.jp/~cac38500/aegpage/1f/steller.htm

[another specialist]

www.geocities.jp/aquaticlifeartgallery/main-page/gallery/digital-page/image-01.htm



www.accordingtothescriptures.org/creation/fossilrecord1.html



homepage3.nifty.com/mamm/sakuhin/sakuhtml/sak6/sak621.htm

[Deleted]

Hi !

While searching for a map of Bering Island I found this:

www.sundayobserver.lk/2006/01/15/fea38.html

[another specialist]

noisi said:

Hi !

While searching for a map of Bering Island I found this:

www.sundayobserver.lk/2006/01/15/fea38.html

Different Outlook
Steller's Sea Cow

by Arefa Tehsin

The enormously powerful winds roused the untamed ocean waters and the storm that followed swayed the ship St Peter to an isolated piece of land rising above the wild sea. The damaged ship, on its way to Kamchatka in November 1741, carried in it naturalist Georg W. Steller.

Stranded on the Bering Island (later named after the ship's captain) in the freezing artic waters in Bering Sea, the crew struggled to rebuild their ship, which took them almost 10 months.



During that time Steller, guided by the probing instincts of a naturalist, even in the harshest and most adverse conditions, discovered a number of new animals. One of them was the sea giant Steller's Sea Cow. These creatures were descendents from land animals which adapted to water, their relative being the elephant. Sadly, the other three genera of the order Sirenidae to which Sea Cow belonged are all endangered today.

These herbivorous gentle giants looked like upturned boats when in the beginning Steller saw them grazing on seaweeds around the nearby bays in herds. Weighing six to seven thousand kilograms and measuring 20-30 feet, these massive sirenians were toothless and possessed short stump-like forelimbs.

Seagulls would leisurely come and sit on their backs feeding on vermin infested skin. After their bellies were stuffed some would sleep on their backs. This animal fascinated Steller and he took considerable interest and effort to elaborately describe it and its habits.

St. Peter's crew killed a sea cow only 6 weeks before they finally escaped in 1742. But this started vicious killings by ships and fur hunters that followed after the word was spread and it ended with the last sea cow being slaughtered in as short a span as 27 years.

Their meat was indisputably delicious and comparable to corned beef and that of young ones to veal, not forgetting their excellent fat. Their meat could be kept for long and would not putrefy even in hot weather.

Their killings brought to light their feelings of compassion. Steller wrote that other animals would come to rescue if one of them was caught by hook and they would try to upset the boat and endeavour to remove the hook by blows of their tails. In spite of the beating given to the male, he would relentlessly try to free the caught female following her to the shore, which was a proof of their conjugal affection.

Several times even after she was dead the male would be found for days standing by her mutilated body.

The herd was quite protective towards the young and the juvenile during pasturing and travelling, always keeping them in the middle. Fresh water seemed to be their favourite and they would spend time near the mouths of gullies and brooks. Their outer skin was quite tough like 'the bark of an old oak'.

But alas, it could not protect them from the iron hooks and spears.

One sea cow was sufficient to feed 33 men for one month! However, their meat was criminally wasted. In the killing of one sea cow, 4-5 were critically wounded and died later on in the ocean. Steller described how they killed it when they were on that island.

He wrote that 4-5 men carried an iron hook in a boat towards the herd. The other end of the hook was fastened by a rope held by 30 men on shore. As soon as the hook was struck, the men on shore pulled the desperately resisting animal towards them.

Meanwhile the men on boat continually attacked it with bayonets, knives and other weapons and pulled it up on land. "Immense slices were cut from the still living animal, but all it did was shake its tail furiously and make such resistance with its forelimbs that big stripes of the cuticle were torn off.

In addition it breathed heavily as if sighing. From the wounds in the back the blood spurted upwards like a fountain..."

The year 1769 saw the last of Stellar's Sea Cow. Tides come and recede, seaweeds grow and flow, sea gulls soar high and low, waves splash in the bay and ships pass by...what no longer catches the eye is the Stellar's Sea Cow, which has sunk into the invincible depths of extinction...

"There is no survivor, there is no future, there is no life to be recreated in this form again. We are looking upon the uttermost finality which can be written, glimpsing the darkness which will not know another ray of light. We are in touch with the reality of extinction."

[sordes]

Link to my model of Hydrodamalis gigas in the gallery: www.petermaas.nl/extinct/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=117&fullsize=1

[another specialist]

Nice model mate

[aliendesigns]

That is an interesting source! . On a sadder note, the steller's sea cow went extinct in 27 years after it's discovery!

[another specialist]

aliendesigns said:

That is an interesting source! . On a sadder note, the steller's sea cow went extinct in 27 years after it's discovery!

Thank you for your opinion aliendesigns

Posted by another specialist on May 18, 2006, 8:34pm

St. Peter's crew killed a sea cow only 6 weeks before they finally escaped in 1742. But this started vicious killings by ships and fur hunters that followed after the word was spread and it ended with the last sea cow being slaughtered in as short a span as 27 years.

[another specialist]

flickr.com/photos/tim-waters/334928081/

[another specialist]

flickr.com/photos/tim-waters/334927636/in/photostream/

[another specialist]

flickr.com/photos/tim-waters/334928526/in/photostream/

[another specialist]

flickr.com/photos/tim-waters/334928982/in/photostream/

[another specialist]

all above from Natural History Museum, Vienna

[another specialist]

flickr.com/photos/kathryncramer/61865685/

[another specialist]

flickr.com/photos/kathryncramer/61865734/

[sordes]

Here are two other pictures of a partial skeleton:
flickr.com/photos/rapsak/117591202/
flickr.com/photos/rapsak/117591203/in/set-72057594085654492/

[another specialist]

sordes said:

Here are two other pictures of a partial skeleton:
flickr.com/photos/rapsak/117591202/
flickr.com/photos/rapsak/117591203/in/set-72057594085654492/

Khabarovsk, Local Lore Museum

[another specialist]

Steller’s sea cow is one of the few very large mammal species to have died out during the recent historical period. This species was also the only sirenian adapted to live in cold waters, and in historical times was found in shallow waters around the coast of the Commander Islands. This last relict population was discovered by the Russian naturalist Georg Steller, the only scientist ever to study the species before its extinction, when he was shipwrecked on Bering Island for nine months from November 1741 to August 1742. The species was wiped out by wasteful overhunting by overwintering Russian fur hunters within 27 years of its discovery.

About the species

The last population was discovered when a Russian explorer was stranded on Bering Island in 1741, at that time it is thought that 1000-2000 individuals remained. The crew slaughter the animals for meat and for skin to use as leather. Steller’s sea cow is thought to have become extinct by 1768 although there were later unconfirmed reports of its presence in various areas. This species is classified as extinct by the IUCN.

In the late Pleistocene this genus evidently occurred all around the rim of the North Pacific from Japan to California. Hunting by primitive people and climate change restricted its range to the Bering Sea. Pleistocene remains of this species have been found on Amchitka Island in the Aleutians and in Monterey Bay off California.

Evolutionary Distinctiveness
Order: Sirenia
Family: Dugongidae

Steller's sea cow was the last surviving representative of a significant sirenian evolutionary radiation in the cold-water conditions of the North-Pacific during the late Tertiary. This lineage diverged from the dugong, now the only living member of the Dugongidae, during the late Oligocene (24-29 million years ago).

Description, Ecology and Habitat

The giant sea cow had dark brown or grey, hairless skin with a very thick rough outer epidermis similar in appearance to tree bark, which was parasitized by many small crustaceans. Its head was small in proportion to the body, and the forelimbs were also relatively small and flipper-like. The tail had two pointed lobes, as in the living dugong. There was no trace of any hind limbs. The species had no functional teeth, but instead had pads of keratin with corresponding v-shaped ridges in the upper and lower jaws, which it used to grind its food.

Although Steller provided no numerical population or life-history data on the sea cows he observed, a 1741 population of ≤1,500 animals was suggested by Leonhard Stejneger, who visited Bering Island from 1882-1883. More recent population estimates have suggested that this population may have consisted of 2,000 animals. Steller's observations suggest that sea cow pairs were monogamous and family groups remained together. He also recorded that sea cows were unable to dive, and were dependent upon shallow inshore kelp beds for food, browsing slowly like cows. The species was apparently fearless of humans, and attempted to aid individuals being attacked by hunters.

Factors leading to extinction

However, the sea cow's narrow relictual distribution was not readily apparent to early naturalists. The possibility of the continued survival of the species in other remote parts of the North Pacific, a region well away from familiar Western European trading or whaling routes, was suggested by several scientists during the nineteenth century, notably the Finnish scientist Adolf Nordenskiöld. Leonhard Stejneger’s eighteen-month stay on Bering Island from 1882-1883 partly served to assess Nordenskiöld’s claims for the sea cow's continued survival, and concluded that a supposed sea-cow reported from Bering Island in 1854 was in fact a stray female narwhal.

Several scientists have recently proposed that hunting alone was insufficient to wipe out sea cows, and that this extinction event was actually driven largely by the removal of their food source due to a sea urchin population explosion, triggered by the contemporaneous extirpation of local sea otter populations by Russian hunters. Removing sea otters from nearshore marine environments generates an alternate stable community dominated by sea urchins, which largely eliminate shallow-water kelps on which sea cows would have fed. However, hunting records from eighteenth century Russian expeditions to the Commander Islands have allowed historical levels of sea cow hunting to be modelled. This indicates that sea cows were indeed massively and wastefully overexploited, being hunted at over seven times the sustainable limit; a mean of 123.3 individuals/year were killed between 1743 and 1763. Environmental changes caused by sea otter declines are therefore extremely unlikely to have contributed to this extinction event.

Prehistoric human hunting elsewhere across its North Pacific range is believed to have restricted Steller's sea cow to the uninhabited Commander Islands by the late Holocene. It is generally thought that the last relict population of sea cows around the Commander Islands was rapidly exterminated by direct overharvesting by Russian fur hunters, who used the islands as regular stopping-off points to stock up on supplies following their discovery in 1741. The species was a tempting target for hunters due to its large size, slow movements and apparent fearlessness. Sea cow meat was easily prepared and extremely tasty, blubber was used for cooking and lamp oil, milk from females was drunk or used for butter, and the skin was used as leather for shoes, belts and boats. One early report states that one sea cow could feed 33 men for a month, and it was customary to store sea cow meat to provision ongoing voyages of at least 12 months. Such provisioning also helped eradicate other insular vertebrates, notably the dodo and several giant tortoise species. These records also suggest that five times as many animals were killed as were actually utilized, through wasteful hunting methods; speared animals were typically allowed to swim away in the hope they would later die and float to shore. The mining engineer Petr Yakovlev, who overwintered on Bering Island in 1754-1755, displayed unusual awareness of extinction by anticipating the sea cow’s disappearance through wasteful overexploitation, and unsuccessfully requesting an ukase [Russian edict or decree] from the Bol’sheretsk Chancellery prohibiting further hunting. However, hunting continued and the last sea cow was killed around 1768 on Bering Island. Another species found only on the Commander Islands, the flightless spectacled cormorant (Phalacrocorax perspicillatus), was also hunted to extinction shortly afterwards (Steller wrote that 'one single bird was sufficient for three starving men').

www.edgeofexistence.org/extinctions/stellas_sea_cow.asp