THE NORTHERN ELEPHANT SEAL.5^J 



.... — 



Macrorhinus angustirostris, Gill. 



By Charles Haskins Townsend, 

 Director of the New York Aquarium. 



Illustrated with Photographs by the Writer. 



The elephant seal is the largest of all seals and owes its name 

 to its great size and to the remarkable trunk or snout developed 

 in the adult male. 



The northern elephant seal has long been on the verge of 

 extinction and is now found only on Guadalupe, an uninhabited 

 island lying in the Pacific Ocean 140 miles off the northern part 

 of the peninsula of Lower California. 



It formerly had a range extending from Cape San Lazaro 

 near Magdalena Bay on the Peninsula, northward to Point Reyes 

 near San Francisco, California, a distance of nearly a thousand 

 miles, and has never been definitely recorded from any other 

 region of the North Pacific Ocean. It was abundant at several 

 points along the coast and especially so on all of the islands off 

 the west coast of Lower California.* 



Being valuable for its oil it was killed in large numbers by 

 vessels primarily engaged in the pursuit of the gray whale which 

 was also abundant in the same region. There is a record show- 

 ing that the elephant seal was being killed for commercial pur- 

 poses at Santa Barbara Island, California, as late as 1852. Dur- 

 ing the late fifties, apparently, its numbers in Lower California 

 became reduced to mere scattered groups. 



Captain C. M. Scammon, who has long been the principal 

 authority on the northern elephant seal, writing in 1869,1 re_ 

 ported that it was then "nearly if not quite extinct." Since the 

 publication in 1874 of his work on the Marine Mammals of the 



*The habitat of the southern elephant seal originally extended throughout the 

 Antarctic islands, including Kerguelen, Heards, St. Paul, Tristan-da-Cunha, Falk- 

 lands, Tierra del Fuego, South Georgia, South Shetlands, Juan Fernandez and 

 islands south of New Zealand. It has disappeared from some of these places and 

 is now found chiefly at Kerguelen Island. 



^Proceedings Academy Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, April, 1869, pp. 61-63. 



