The Buran Whaler Sighting of Six Sea Cow-Like Animals off Cape Navarin

Steller's sea cow, Hydrodamalis gigas, is usually dated extinct by 1768. Mainstream zoology considers the matter settled. Yet the northern seas kept producing stories. Animals killed on Bering Island in the late 1770s. Accounts from Attu. A stranding in the Gulf of Anadyr in 1910. A harpooner in the 1950s who spoke of regular July appearances.

July 1962. The Soviet whaling ship Buran was in the Bering Sea near Cape Navarin, in Chukotka, south of the Gulf of Anadyr.

The crew spotted six large, unusual-looking animals grazing in the shallows. They were close. Less than 100 m away, or about 300 ft in Karl Shuker's telling. Each was 6 to 8 m long, 20 to 26 ft. The skin was dark. A small head was clearly differentiated from the body. The upper lip was split into two sections. The tail was bilobate, with "a sort of fringe along the edge."

The next day the herd was seen again. Half a dozen animals, now in a shallow lagoon supporting meadows of seaweed and sea cabbage. Nothing was photographed. Nothing was filmed. No crew member's name has come down to us.

The whalers described what they had seen to Soviet scientists A. A. Berzin, E. A. Tikhomirov and V. I. Troinin. In 1963 the three published it in Priroda, the journal of the USSR Academy of Sciences, under a title that was itself a question. "Is the Steller sea cow extinct?"

The retellings do not agree on every point. One Russian account, in Nauka i Zhizn, credits scientists aboard a Soviet research vessel rather than whalers. English Wikipedia places the encounter off Kamchatka and adds trunks to the split lips. The third author's name appears as Troinin, Tronin and Troshin.

Zoologists later proposed a quieter answer. Female narwhals, which have no tusks. Karl Shuker disagrees. The description, he argues, fits Steller's sea cow more closely than a female narwhal, and "it seems unlikely that experienced whalers would fail to recognise such a familiar creature." Narwhals have no split lip, though their flukes are notched. Other writers have suggested a mistaken identity involving other marine mammals. In Russia, the magazine Vokrug Sveta notes, the subject is treated as closed.

The sighting launched no expedition of its own. Later searches were broader. In the late 1970s British explorer Derek Hutchinson searched off the Aleutian Islands. In the early 1980s Soviet physicist Dr Anatoly Shkunkov tried off Kamchatka. Neither succeeded.

Other reports followed. In 1966 a Kamchatka newspaper described dark-skinned animals seen from a ship near Cape Navarin, and its author was simply ridiculed. In 1976 salmon-factory workers found a stranded carcass in Anapkinskaya Bay, and one of them, Ivan Nikiforovich Chechulin, matched it to Steller's sea cow. Today the Buran case lives on in George M. Eberhart's Mysterious Creatures and on Shuker's pages. Six animals. Two days. One question still open.