Veintisiete años. Eso duró desde que la encontramos hasta que la matamos.

Georg Wilhelm Steller first saw Hydrodamalis gigas on November 7, 1741, from a beach on Bering Island, after Vitus Bering's Russian expedition was shipwrecked there. His description of the animal—its size, its tree-bark-like skin, its feeding habits on the surface, its complete lack of fear of humans—is the only direct record of the species alive. Twenty-seven years later, in 1768, a Russian hunter named Ivan Popov killed the last three on the planet on the same island. Steller didn't see a single one alive after 1742. No one did after 1768. This is the first large animal whose extinction has a date, name, and written record, and those who killed it left their signatures in their ships' logs. This video isn't a tragic story. It's a record. A nine-meter-long, ten-ton animal, with no natural predators, an anatomy specifically adapted to the cold waters of the Commander Islands, and an estimated population of around 1,500 at the time of its discovery, took twenty-seven years to be wiped off the face of the earth. It wasn't the climate. It wasn't a catastrophe. It was promyshlenniki—Russian fur trappers—who stopped in Bering on their way to Kamchatka and discovered that the meat of this marine cow was edible, plentiful, and absurdly easy to obtain. One of these animals could feed a ship's crew for six months. In this video: Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709–1746): physician, naturalist, surgeon of the Bering Sea November 1741: shipwreck on Bering Island, the observation of an untouched world Hydrodamalis gigas: anatomy, diet, behavior — everything we know comes from Steller Why it didn't flee: 200,000 years without human predators on the Commander Islands 1742–1768: the real list of Russian hunters who exterminated it Ivan Popov, 1768: the last documented killing Leonhard Stejneger, 1887: the analysis that fixed the date of extinction Why Steller's body never made it to any European museum What "extinction with names and dates" means in the history of conservation 1768 → 2026: 258 years without seeing this animal, when it was Here with us 📍 Key facts from the episode: Species: Hydrodamalis gigas (Zimmermann, 1780) Original description: Georg Wilhelm Steller, "De bestiis marinis" (published posthumously in 1751) Location: Commander Islands (Bering Island + Copper Island), Bering Sea, Russia Size: 8–9 meters in length, ~10 tons Diet: Surface kelp (Alaria, Laminaria) — the only known cold-water sirenian Population at discovery: ~1500 individuals (low estimate from Domning et al. 2007) Discovery: November 1741 Documented extinction: 1768 (last reported kill by Ivan Popov) Definitive retrospective analysis: Leonhard Stejneger, "How the Great Northern Sea-Cow (Rytina) "Became Exterminated" (American Naturalist, 1887) Total duration of human-species contact: 27 years Body preserved in the West: zero complete specimens; partial bones in the Zoological Institute of St. Petersburg, the Natural History Museum of Helsinki, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and a few others. 🔗 Related videos: ← Last Wednesday: Tilly Edinger read the brains of dinosaurs that died one hundred million years ago, in the basement of a museum under the Nazi regime. → Next Wednesday: We close out the month with an animal that has remained unchanged for five hundred million years—and is still alive. The nautilus. 💬 What animal still alive today do you think is on the same path as the manatee in 1745, twenty years before its end? Leave your answer below. 🔔 New episode every Wednesday and Saturday. This Wednesday we close out the month with the nautilus. #StellerCow #HydrodamalisGigas #extinction #paleontology #Bering #GeorgSteller #historyofscience #MegafaunaEra #mermaids