Elephant Seal on the beach of Sealion Island in the Falklands
Sea Lion Island is km ( mi) long from east to west and km ( mi) wide, with 30 m (98 ft) cliffs at the south-western point and sandy bays to the east. The highest point at 46 m (151 ft) is Bull Hill. East Loafers is the name of the bay on the southern shore. It also has a few ponds, including Beaver and Long Pond. Just to the south is Rum Island, a small seal colony. Other small members of the group are Brandy and Whisky Islands. The geology is mainly sandstone and mudstone, from about 250 million years ago. Some minor fossils have been found. Elephant seals are large, oceangoing earless seals in the genus Mirounga. The two species, the northern elephant seal (M. angustirostris) and the southern elephant seal (M. leonina), were both hunted to the brink of extinction by the end of the 19th century, but the numbers have since recovered. The northern elephant seal, somewhat smaller than its southern relative, ranges over the Pacific coast of the , Canada and Mexico. The most northerly breeding location on the Pacific Coast is at Race Rocks, at the southern tip of Vancouver Island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The southern elephant seal is found in the Southern Hemisphere on islands such as South Georgia and Macquarie Island, and on the coasts of New Zealand, South Africa, and Argentina in the Peninsula Valdés, which is the fourth-largest elephant seal colony in the world. In southern Chile, there is a small colony of 120 animals at Jackson Bay, Admiralty Sound (Seno Almirantazgo), Tierra del Fuego. The oldest known unambiguous elephant seal fossils are fragmentary fossils of an unnamed member of the tribe Miroungini described from the late Pliocene Petane Formation of New originally identified as representing an unnamed species of Mirounga have been found in South Africa, and dated to the Miocene epoch; however Boessenecker & Churchill (2016) considered these teeth to be almost certainly misidentified odontocete teeth.
Size: 4930px × 3287px
Location: Sealion Island Falklands
Photo credit: © Philip Jones / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: atlantic, elephant, falkland, horizontal, island, islands, land, leonina, malvinas, mammals, mirounga, sea, seal, sealion, south, southern
