Supplement to the catalogue of seals and whales in the British Museum

by John Edward Gray

Capt. Abbott, in 1866, sent to the British Museum a large and a small Seal from the Falkland Islands. The large one was examined and determined to be the southern Sea-lion (Otaria jubata). The small one, nearly 3 feet long, was very similar in external appearance; and as the teeth, which could be seen without extracting the skull, showed that it was a young animal, it was regarded as the young of the Sea-lion, and it was stuffed without extracting the skull, and labelled as such. This specimen has been examined by several zoologists, among the rest by Dr. Peters, when engaged with his paper on Eared Seals, and has passed unchallenged until this time, thus showing how difficult it is to distinguish these animals by their external characters alone.

Capt. Abbott, who is now residing in England, informed me that the smaller specimen was the Fur-Seal of the Falkland Islands, that it grows to about half as long again as the specimen sent, and that the old males are grey from the tips of the hairs. I have therefore had the skull extracted from the specimen; and there is no doubt that it is quite distinct from the Sea-lion (Otaria jubata); and, on more careful examination of the skin, I have little doubt, from the colour and the character of the fur, that it is a young specimen of the Seal that I described as Arctocephalus nigrescens. It is interesting as confirming the accuracy of the habitat that I received with that specimen, and which until this time I considered doubtful, as Pennant and others describe the Falkland Island Fur-Seal as grey, and white beneath.

Dr. Peters, on the authority of this habitat (which I have always quoted with doubt), has given the name of Arctophoca falklandica to the animal and skull on which I had established my Arctocephalus nigrescens.

In the British Museum there is the skin of a very young Seal, which was presented by Sir John Richardson as the Falkland Island Fur-Seal, with the observation appended that the adult is 5 feet long, and its skin is worth fifteen dollars. It is without its skull. The fur of this young Seal is dark brown, reddish beneath, and very like that of the young specimen sent by Capt. Abbott; but the hairs are smoother, and the white tips to them are longer and more marked, giving the animal a more grizzled appearance.

There is another young Eared Seal, very like the former, which was received with General Hardwicke’s Collection (who, no doubt, purchased it of a dealer), said to have come from the Cape of Good Hope. I suspect this habitat must be erroneous; for it is very unlike what I recollect of the young Cape Eared Seals, which are called “Black Dogs,” on account of the blackness of their colour. Unfortunately we have no specimen of the latter in the Museum collection. General Hardwicke’s specimen only differs from Sir John Richardson’s in being less punctulated with white; fewer hairs have a white tip, and the tip is shorter.

Both these young specimens differ from the half-grown one obtained from Capt. Abbott, in the fur being softer and smooth to the touch; and Capt. Abbott’s specimen differs from the adult in the length and greater crispness of its fur, the fur of the old one being harsh and hard and closer pressed.

In the first essay, Dr. Peters places Phoca falklandica, Shaw, and Otaria nigrescens together, with doubt, observing that one was known from the skin, and the other by the skull, overlooking the fact that the name nigrescens implied that I had seen the colour of the fur, which was not that given by Shaw to his animal; in his second essay, Dr. Shaw’s, Dr. Burmeister’s, and my animal are all classed together without any doubt.

The skull of Capt. Abbott’s Fur-Seal from the Falkland Islands shows that it was a very young animal, which had only developed its first grinders, the permanent series being developed below them. The tentorium is bony and well developed. The teeth are the same in position and number as they are in the adult skull; and the upper ones, as far as developed, are small and conical, except the fifth upper grinder, which is largest, triangular, with a single subconical lobe on the base of the hinder edge of the cone. The lower canines are small, scarcely larger than the cutting-teeth, which are nearly uniform in size. The lower grinders are of a much larger size than the upper ones in the adult skull, as if they belonged to the permanent series: they are of the same form as the teeth in adult skulls; but the central cone is higher and more acute, and the anterior and posterior lobes at the base of the cone are more developed and acute, the lobes of the last or fifth grinder being larger and rather on the inner surface of the tooth.

The skull of Capt. Abbott’s animal is evidently not the same as the skull of a young Eared Seal described and figured by Dr. Burmeister as the skull of Arctocephalus falklandicus from the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, in the Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. ser. 3, vol. xviii. p. 99, t. 9, which, from the appearance of the grinders, I suspect is the young skull of Phocarctos Hookeri, the Hair-Seal of the Falkland Islands. There is a considerable difference in the proportions of the skull sent by Capt. Abbott from those of the one figured by Dr. Burmeister. In Capt. Abbott’s specimen the brain-case, from the back edge of the orbit to the occiput, is as long as the length of the face, from the same edge of the orbit to the end of the nose. In Dr. Burmeister’s figure, the face from the same point is much longer than the brain-case.

*** Fourth, fifth, and sixth upper grinders with two diverging roots; the fifth upper grinder entirely behind the hinder edge of the zygomatic arch. The palate narrow. Gypsophoca. (Australia.)