A very small halibut

This is a small, 2 inch long carving of a a halibut fish (Hippoglossus hippoglossus) made by an Inuit craftsman. The interest lies in the fact that it made from the fossil remains of two extinct animals.

The fish itself is made from mammoth ivory, with eyes made from whale baleen. The last mammoths walked the earth some 5000 years ago. The fish is sitting on a piece of fossil bone from a Stellers's sea cow, a species which is, I guess, rather less well known than the mammoths.

Steller's sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas) was the largest member of the Order Sirenia, a group of marine herbivorous mammals. Today, its closest living relatives, are the dugong (Dugong dugon), and the manatees (Trichechus spp.). By 1741 when it was first described by George Wilhelm Steller, chief naturalist on an expedition led by explorer Vitus Bering, it was limited to a single, isolated population on the Commander Islands, 175 kilometres east of the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Bering Sea. Within 27 years of its discovery by Europeans, the slow moving and easily captured Steller's sea cow was hunted to extinction, by sailors, seal hunters, and fur traders who hunted them both for food and for their skins, and for lamp oil.

#afternoon #wednesday #mammoth #april #inuit #halibut #ivory #sea-cow #steller