Phocids (true seals) are characterized by having no external ear and reduced limbs. Elephant seals are considered true seals, and fall under the family Phocidae. Description Įlephant seals are marine mammals classified under the order Pinnipedia, which, in Latin, means feather- or fin-footed. However, it is not known which language this represents. The generic name Mirounga is a Latinization of miouroung, which is said to have been a term for the seal in an Australian Aboriginal language. John Edward Gray established the genus Mirounga in 1827. Įlephant seals breed annually and are seemingly habitual to colonies that have established breeding areas. The elephant seals evolved in the Pacific Ocean during the Pliocene period.
Teeth originally identified as representing an unnamed species of Mirounga have been found in South Africa, and dated to the Miocene epoch however, Boessenecker and Churchill (2016) considered these teeth almost certainly to be misidentified toothed whale (odontocete) teeth. The oldest known unambiguous elephant seal fossils are fragmentary fossils of a member of the tribe Miroungini described from the late Pliocene Petane Formation of New Zealand. In southern Chile, there is a small colony of 120 animals at Jackson Bay ( Bahía Jackson) in Admiralty Sound ( Seno Almirantazgo) at the southern coast of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego. The southern elephant seal is found in the Southern Hemisphere on islands such as South Georgia and Macquarie Island, and on the coasts of New Zealand, Tasmania, South Africa, and Argentina in the Peninsula Valdés. The most northerly breeding location on the Pacific Coast is at Race Rocks Marine Protected Area, at the southern tip of Vancouver Island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
The northern elephant seal, somewhat smaller than its southern relative, ranges over the Pacific coast of the U.S., Canada and Mexico. They are the largest extant carnivorans, weighing up to 5,000 kilograms (11,000 lb). leonina), were hunted to the brink of extinction for oil by the end of the 19th century, but their numbers have since recovered. angustirostris) and the southern elephant seal ( M. Both species, the northern elephant seal ( M.
Elephant seals are very large, oceangoing earless seals in the genus Mirounga.
0 kommentar(er)
