Natural History

It’s a Northern elephant seal skull.

This is what they look like alive:

Source.

Northern elephant seals are the second largest members of the order Carnivora. The largest is the Southern elephant seal.

This may have been a bit confusing for some of you because seals, sea lions, and walruses were once classified in their own order called Pinnipedia. This order is no longer considered valid.

Seals, sea lions, and the walrus are derived from the same common ancestor as bears.

That puts these marine mammals with in the suborder Caniformia. This suborder includes dogs, bears,  the red panda, mustelids, skunks and stink badgers, and procyonids.

The smallest member of the order Carnivora is the least weasel. It is a mustelid, and it is also a member of the suborder Caniformia. The largest fully terrestrial member of the order Carnivora is the Kodiak subspecies of the brown bear, but the largest bear is the polar bear, which could be classified as a marine mammal.

The other suborder in Carnivora is Feliformia, which isn’t quite as spectacularly diverse in shapes, but it does include hyenas, which is why hyenas are more closely related to cats than they are to dogs.

I should point out that Southern elephant seals are significantly larger than Northern elephant seals. The biggest bull Northern elephant seals weigh about 5,000 pounds. On average, the biggest Southern elephant seals weigh over 8,000 pounds. The biggest on record was nearly 11,000 pounds in weight.

In case you’re curious, the walrus is a close third behind the northern elephant seal when it comes to size. The biggest bull walruses weigh over 4,00o pounds.  The fourth largest is the Steller’s sea lion, which gets up to around 2,500 pounds.

All of these are much larger than Kodiak and polar bears. The biggest wild Kodiak bears weigh over 1,400 pounds, and the heaviest polar bear on record supposedly weighed over 2,000 pounds (I’m skeptical). One should remember that polar bears are actually a modified brown bear that can utilize marine and polar ice environments.

Northern elephant seals experienced a rapid population drop when whalers augmented their stores of train with their blubber. The population is believed to have dropped to as low as 100 individuals. There are currently 100,000 of  them on the Pacific Coast of North America. These animals have very low genetic diversity, and although they appear fine right now in terms of their productivity, the species could be fragile.