Up until the 18th century , a ginormous but gentle ocean “ colossus ” waste in the Arctic waters of the Bering Sea , off the slide of Russia . Until , we hunted it to extinguishing , of course .
The Steller ’s sea cow was only discovered in 1741 and just 27 years later it was no more . Since then it has kind of flummoxed scientists as we do n’t get it on very much about it .
Now , one of the most accomplished skeletons of the gentle giant ( albeit sadly miss a head ) has been discovered on a lonely beach on one of the Commander Islands of Siberia , revealing a beast estimated to be around 6 meters ( 20 foot ) in length – the sizing of a killer whale .
The bones of the elephantine ribcage were first spotted by Marina Shitova of the Commander Islands Nature Reserve , protruding out of the grit . She describedseeing what look like fence poles jut out of the footing .
After just 4 hours of digging in less than a meter ( 3 feet ) of ground , Shitova and her team had exhume the 5 - metre - long ( 17 feet ) skeleton of the massive marine mammal . amazingly well - uphold , it includes 45 vertebra , 27 ribs , and a left over scapula . woefully no head was discovered , but they have n’t given up Bob Hope of receive it in the surrounding area .
The Steller ’s sea moo-cow , part of the sirenian order that includes dugongs and manatees , was one of the last Pleistocene megafaunas , and the expectant mammal of the Holocene , barring cetaceans . It could grow up to 10 time ( 30 feet ) and weighed around 10 MT ( 11 US tons ) .
It was named after Georg Steller , the German naturalist and adventurer who discover it in 1741 . He had some interesting ideas about the animate being , let in that it may havewalked on solid ground – which is n’t actually that crazy seeing as sea moo-cow are members of the paenungulates clade , just like elephants and hyrax .
They were endemical to the sea between Siberia and Alaska , and when Steller revealed to the human race his discovery , sadly they became prize hunting due to their abundance of pith and peel , but also because they were slow and easy , and so rather easy to kill .
frame of the giant marine mammals are rare these days , with a museum in Finland the only make out place to hold an entire skeleton in the closet that is n’t a composite of many different individual . This new one will go on show at theKomandorsky Nature Reserve , to not only educate the great unwashed about the born account of the Commander Islands , but to remind people of the awesome megafauna that once roamed the earth , and that our actions have consequences .
