Word: dugong
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...star attraction at California's Steinhart Aquarium last week was a sleek, 180-lb. female named Eugenie. A placid seaweed-eater that looks like the product of an accidental mating of a hippo and a walrus, Eugenie is a dugong, one of the fast-disappearing submarine elephants that range the warm oceans from the Red Sea to the South Pacific. Six feet long and probably three years old, she was caught by a native fisherman off the Palau Islands and flown to San Francisco by Stanford University Ichthyologist Dr. Robert Rees Harry. U.S. marine biologists believe that Eugenie...
Song of the Siren. Dugongs are sea mammals mysteriously descended from some remote aquatic ancestor of the elephant. Like elephants, they have tusks; like whales, they must rise to the surface to gulp in lungfuls of air. The female dugong's nipples are conspicuous and set forward; when suckling her calf, the mother clasps it to her breast with a flipper that bends at the elbow. At such moments, the head and shoulders of the dugong rise from the water in a vaguely human attitude. Many ichthyologists believe that this-and the fishlike tail the dugong displays when diving...