Manatee Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Manatees (family Trichechidae, genus Trichechus) are large, fully aquatic, mostly herbivorous marine mammals sometimes known as sea cows. There are three accepted living species of Trichechidae, representing three of the four living species in the order Sirenia: the Amazonian manatee (Trichechus inunguis), the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus), and the West African manatee (Trichechus senegalensis). They measure up to 13 feet (4.0 m) long, weigh as much as 1,300 pounds (590 kg),] and have paddle-like flippers. The name manatí comes from the Taíno, a pre-Columbian people of the Caribbean, meaning "breast". http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...6P2JDA&usg=AFQjCNFN8Kv3t4p1RRdPLY8Y_DnECuVBSg
Here's a different view of them. It is a manatee, I've swam with them before and fed them lettuce. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I must admit - I had to flip between the pictures several times to get the context neccessary to relate the two images.
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ....You know...it had to be done... They are related to hyrax, aren't they? I think I remember reading that...
Its hard to tell at that angle. Nice shot! Probably a mantee! Did you follow the story of the whale traveling through a channel, ended up dying recently? Sad! Probably wanted to see what ground life was and tree's before dying. I think it knew it was its last adventure. :bawl:
why is it,...any creature that we don't recognize is a so called 'monster'...???!!! but this lo0ks photoshoped ...!:bugeye:
Who called it a monster? And its not photo shopped. Its just the angle of the shot and the way it was swimming at the time
Uh....Cosmic nailed it immediately. There is no ambiguity or weirdness about the shot either - this seems pretty typical of manatee, no need to Photoshop a pic to get that. It is common enough occurrence.
The manatees (including the dugong) have their own order, Sirenia. Sirenia is listed in the superorder of Afrotheria, which makes them slightly more closely related to the hyraxes, elephants, aardvarks, and a few other odds and ends, than they are to the other mammals. It's important to note that they are not pinnipeds: the seals and sea lions, which are carnivorans related to the dogs, cats, bears, hyenas, weasels, skunks, etc. And they are also not cetaceans, the whales and dolphins, which recently have been reclassified with the artiodactyls: cattle, sheep, camels, giraffes, hippos, deer, etc. Apparently the adaptation of a mammal to a fully or almost-fully aquatic life is an attractive one which has been done more than once. That makes sense, since warm-blooded air-breathing animals have a tremendous energy advantage over cold-blooded gill-breathers, and can often out-fight and eat any aquatic animal of similar size.
And here's one after 10 years of swimming in that reactor water. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
