steller's mysterious animals

The crow and the steller sea bear, 2 pending mysteries to solve

  Georg Wilhelm Steller was a German botanist, zoologist, doctor and explorer of the 18th century, who worked in Russia and is remembered for his famous Participation in the second Russian expedition to Kamchatka led by the honorable Vitus Jonassen Bering, in addition to being the first Westerner to describe the area accurately.

During his journey through the Kamchatka region, and the exploration of the Bering Strait, he led an expedition that had the purpose of mapping the Arctic coast of Siberia and looking for a passage east to North America would be what catapulted him to fame.

    [Map of the Bering Sea era]

Bering was the first to describe and make known countless plants and animals of that area, such as the great Steller's sea cow or the small and elusive Steller's jay.

However, there are 2 mysterious animals that Steller mentioned in his writings that until now remain unidentified and that even despite the past centuries, have not been able to be explained in some way by zoologists, come with me to see these cases, about which almost no one has spoken at the Anglo-Saxon level and have never been mentioned in the Hispanic world.

Steller's fur seal

  In the book De Bestiis Marinis of 1751, (whose PDF will be in the blog library), Steller stated that the Rutheni people talked a lot about a mysterious creature known as a sea bear, an amphibious marine beast very similar to a bear, but very ferocious, both on land and in water.

According to this animal, it lived near the Kuril Islands, and is more numerous towards Japan, and was covered in white fur, being very similar to the polar bear, but curiously there is no confirmed record that the polar bear has been found anywhere as far south as the Kuril Islands, much less towards those of Japan, so everything generates more doubts than answers.

Although there are various theories, nothing seems to agree with this, perhaps they were confusions or exaggerations, or perhaps, a possible species of bear similar to the polar bear lived in those areas centuries ago and is now extinct.

steller's sea crow

  This is a strange species of bird that was seen in Bering during 1741-42 by Steller who briefly referred to them in his diary.

According to Steller, this was a disconcerting species that he named the white sea crow, quite large but impossible to reach because it only perches alone on cliffs facing the sea, although according to steller's words, it did not resemble any bird from the siberian coast, however, this species has never been formally iidentified; he does not appear to have been informed again by anyone else.

[[Illustrative image]]

However, this species is impossible to identify, with a couple of theories, such as that it was perhaps a misidentified member of the Aphriza virgata species. a species of white-plumaged wading bird from Alaska and the western Pacific of the United States.

Likewise, there is a theory that it could have been a spectacled cormorant with the scientific name Phalacrocorax perspicillat, an already extinct species of Bering cormorant, discovered by steller, which perhaps could have been the origin of said creature.

There is no doubt that these enigmatic species deserve to be better known and disseminated, since almost no one has talked about them, but their mystery is still valid and perhaps, never be resolved, for now I invite you all to take care of our current species, which are wonderful and deserve all the efforts to be preserved and conserved the beauty that captivated naturalists such as steller.

[[[Links de lectura]]]

https://karlshuker.blogspot.com/2011/01/stellers-sea-bear-polar-bear-in-japan.html?m=1

https://karlshuker.blogspot.com/2014/12/stellers-secret-fauna-gargantuan-sea.html?m=1