Steller’s Sea Cow
Twenty-seven years from discovery to never again.
- EXISTED
- Until 1768
- WHERE
- The Commander Islands, Bering Sea
- LOST
- 1768
- CAUSE OF LOSS
- Hunted for meat, fat and hide by fur traders
Steller’s sea cow was a colossal, gentle relative of the manatee, up to nine metres long and perhaps ten tonnes, grazing the kelp beds of the frozen Bering Sea. It had no fear of people and could not submerge to escape them; wounded animals were defended by their companions, who would gather around the harpooned and try to pull the ropes free.
It was first described for science in 1741 by Georg Steller, the naturalist shipwrecked with Vitus Bering’s expedition. The fur traders who followed in his wake butchered the slow, trusting giants for provisions, and the entire species, already reduced to a single relict population, was gone by 1768. Few creatures have passed from discovery to extinction so swiftly that the same lifetime contained both.
The naturalist Georg Steller described the species in 1741. The last was killed in 1768, just twenty-seven years later. No living scientist ever saw a second generation of them.