Once ranging across the North Pacific during the Pleistocene epoch, by the eighteenth century, this sirenian mammal was found only around the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea. Its first recorded encounter with humans occurred in 1741, when the German botanist and explorer George Wilhelm Steller shipwrecked on Bering Island and spent a year researching wildlife while awaiting rescue, which explains how he came to describe the animal's taste as reminiscent of corned beef. An obligate herbivore, we know little about the sea cow's behavior beyond what was observed by Steller, though --- unique for its biological order --- the animal's buoyancy was so great that it was unable to submerge in water, instead harvesting kelp with its toothless, bristled mouth from across the ocean surface. Our knowledge is also limited regarding the cause of the sirenian's extinction, but it is conjectured that populations may have initially dwindled due to hunting by the Siberian Yupik people, and then were further depleted by fur traders traveling the route to Alaska pioneered by Vitus Bering. Literature readers may know the animal as the rare white seal from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and the poetry of W. G. Sebald. While later sightings were reported in the 1800s and as late as 1962, the official extinction date remains 1768, twenty-seven years after Steller discovered the sea cow.