Friday 23 October 2020

Parsons Long Necked Seal

 

In 1750 Dr James Parsons, member of the Royal Society wrote A Dissertation upon the Class of the Phocae Marinae In it he references Musaeum Regalis Societatis; or a Catalogue & Description of the Natural and Artificial Rarities belonging to the Royal Society and preserved at Gresham College This early was a description of natural artefacts which the Royal Society in England had been collecting from the mid-1660s onwards and was catalogued in 1681 by one Dr Nehemiah Grew a botanist and one time secretary to the society. In part one of the resulting tome on page 95, in a chapter called of Fifthes [sic] he includes the following intriguing description:

 

The Long Necked seal I find him nowhere distinctly mentioned [M]uch slenderer than either of the former; but that, wherein he principally differs, is the length of his neck; for from his nose-end to his fore-feet, and from thence to his tail, are the same measure; as also in that, instead of his fore-feet, he hath rather fins; not having any claws thereon, as have the other kind.

 

 



Scott Mardis subsequently brought this image to the world’s attention where the possibility that it could be proof of the existence of some undescribed species of long-necked seal, a theory pioneered by Bernard Heuvelmans, was debated.

The animal itself is clearly some form of fur seal or sea lion; it has webbed fore-flippers without claws, albeit one with what appears to have an overly long neck. However this feature was often emphasised by illustrators of natural history of the time. According to Parsons its origin was obscure and the Rarities collection later fell into disrepair with part of it being transferred to the British Museum and possibly the Natural History Museum in London where the skin of this unusual specimen appears to have been lost.

At the time Parsons wrote his dissertation, knowledge of otariids (fur seals and sea lions) was minimal with most still awaiting proper scientific description and the great naturalist Otto Fabricius had referred to the animal, believing it to be a genuine species, in his seminal work the Seals of Greenland (1790). However the most logical and obvious solution is that it was simply a species of eared seal (otariid), probably a fur seal, that had been imported into Europe during the seventeenth century. European sailors would have observed such animals which were termed sea dogs, sea bears etc. prior to scientific classification. The Cape Fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus) also known as the South African fur seal and Australian fur seal for instance, had become a staple diet of sailors as they travelled around the Cape of Good Hope in the late 1500s. So it is very likely that Parson`s seal was simply an early specimen of otariid that found its way to England and ended up in the Rarities Collection.


Seal at Hout Bay, South Africa (Mike Peel) CCASA 4.0 International

 

Indeed this supposition was subsequently made by the naturalist William Jardine and William Hamilton in The Natural History of the Amphibious Carnivora, Including the Walrus and Seals, Also of the Herbivorous Cetacea, &c. Illustrated by Thirty-three [i.e. 32] Plates, with Memoir and Portrait of Peron – Robert Hamilton (M.D.) (page 271, circa 1839) and J.E.Grey in  Observations on the fur-seals of the Antarctic seas and the Cape of Good Hope, with the description of a new species 

 

Dr. Shaw, in his Zoology, translated the name into Phoca longicollis and copied Parsons' figure. The name and the form of the front feet are enough to show that it is an Eared Seal; for the neck of these animals is always long compared with the neck of the Earless Seals or Phocidae. Though the habitat is not given, there can be no doubt, when we consider the geographical distribution of the Eared Seal, that it must have been received either from the southern part of South America or from the Cape of Good Hope, as the animals of the Northern Pacific and of Australia were not known or brought to England in 1686. As no account of the colour of the fur is given, it is impossible to determine to which of the species inhabiting these countries it should be referred. It is most probably the Sea-Lion (Otaria leonina), as that is the animal which is most generally distributed and commonly brought to England. The sailor’s some-times call it the Long-necked Seal.

 

An interesting footnote is the fascinating notion those entrepreneurial sailors may have brought living specimens of fur seal or sea lion back to Europe well before they were imported for entertainment in the mid-1860s. But there would have been some problems on their return; firstly sea lions need a lot of food to sustain them and secondly at a time when there were no purpose built aquarium’s to accommodate them, they would have to have some access to the sea or other bodies of water presumably making them difficult to manage without the possibility of potential escape or deliberate release…..possibly becoming early pseudo lake-monsters………

 

Adapted from The Seal Serpent

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