| |
|
2024 |
Cuvier's empirical study of sea cows (Cuvier, 1809), and the challenge of a sea cow record in Fauna Groenlandica (Fabricius, 1780).
Revue de Paleobiologie, Geneve 43(1): 3-25. 6 figs. ISSN 0253-6730
–ABSTRACT - Sea cows, Order Sirenia Illiger, 1811, absent from European waters after the late Pliocene cooling, entered the cultural sphere of Western Europeans about 500 years ago, when Oviedo (1535) described "el Manati" in the New World. Columbus had mentioned mermaids in his logbooks from the warm seas, and increased sailing to faraway coasts gave sailors occasion for bringing stuffed sea cows to Europe. Linnaeus grouped sea cows (manatees, sole sea cows known by L.) with whales in 1735, but classified them with walruses in the genus Trichechus in 1758. In Systema Naturae, 12th edition (1766-1768), Linne ranged manatees and Steller's sea cows in the species T. manatus. Young Otho Fabricius sailed from Copenhagen in 1768 to take up the post as Lutheran missionary and Pastor to Frederikshaab / Pamiut in southwest Greenland. With the Inuit hunters he learned about the fauna, which was rich over the 'West Greenland fishing banks'. Around 1772 he identified a worn cranium found locally as that of a sea cow, based on the Greenlanders' auveKajaK, "looking like walrus", and Systema Naturae (Linne, 1766). Returned from Greenland, he recorded it in Fauna Groenlandica (Fabricius, 1780) as Steller's sea cow. Georges Cuvier, who studied animals and fossils anatomically, and had good access to literature and skeletons in Paris, expressed reservation about Fabricius' determination (Cuvier, 1809). He doubted that a Steller's sea cow could pass through the Arctic Ocean and the Baffin Bay to Greenland. The present study deciphers former thinking and applies results of satellite monitoring of sea currents to approach the truth about the worn cranium. It now seems that, in the essence, both men were right: A Steller's sea cow, Hydrodamalis gigas, could hardly have reached Greenland through the North-West Passage. And a West Indian manatee, Trichechus manatus Linne, 1758, could well be represented by its worn cranium in southwest Greenland. -- "Fabricius' sea cow", doubted by many, in all probability was a West Indian manatee carried off by a "freakish" Gulf Stream.
|