Ail Extraordinary Specimen.

Auckland Star, Volume XX, Issue 147, 22 June 1889, Page 1 (Supplement)

Ail Extraordinary Specimen.

A London paper informs us thab bhe Easber holiday visitors to the " Zoo " had the opportunity of interviewing the latesb if nob the most disbinguished of strangers arriving in London. This is bhe Manatee, as grotesque a beast, perhaps, as exists in the whole range of the Mammalia, and the firsb, except one, of its kind ever seen alive among us. The Manatee lodges ab present in a large warm water tank of the reptile house, opposite the snapping turtle, and consumes three dozen lettuces a day, or their equivalent in green, stuff. It eats always under water, using its fore paws like hands, but comes up occasionally after the fashion of a seal, to take in a supply of air. Shaped like a fish, with the habits of a cetacean, and yet grazing on the river weeds like a sheep, this new creature is certainly one of the oddest of Nature's freaks—yet geologically most interesting withal, for he and the Dugong of the Indian Ocean are the only surviving representatives — now the Rhytina or Sea Cow is exterminated—of bhe primeval Sirenia, abundant in bhe Pleistocene.