Huge mounds of shell dot the jap shore of America. They heap alongside the intertidal creeks and the banks of bays, as small as king-sized beds and as massive as soccer fields. Some are just some layers deep and others are as tall as a three-story constructing. They lay within the roots of cedars and erode out of river banks. Homes have been constructed upon them. Others have been mined for rooster feed. To the untrained eye, they seem like an enormous pile of outdated white shells. To archeologists, they’re a dream as a result of inside these mounds lies a stockpile of invaluable human artifacts.
Researchers name them shell middens, and so they as soon as served as processing vegetation for coastal-dwelling Native Individuals. Right here, indigenous Individuals shucked bivalves and disposed of scraps. Within the course of, they left behind all kinds of instruments and butchered bones that date again 1000’s of years. Archeologists research the middens to know their diets, motion patterns throughout the panorama, and the time at which they occupied the location.
The 12 months was 1909, and shrouded by summer season seaspray on the rocky shoreline of Flagg Island, Maine, Professor Frederic Loomis, a paleontologist on the College at Amerherst, combed by way of the stays of clams, whelk, fish, and oyster on an eroding shell midden. At the moment, most of Maine’s shell middens had been unmolested by growth and mining, and the time was ripe for zoological discovery.
Whereas flipping by way of the shells, Loomis found a cranium fragment of unexplainable proportions. It appeared like a mink—compressed, slender, sharp, with piercing canines and crushing molars, however a lot bigger. Then, he discovered one other and one other and stored accumulating them till he had 45. Loomis didn’t realize it then, however his discovery sparked a century-long taxonomic debate that continues to at the present time.
Discovering The Sea Mink
Mink are the carnivorous slinkies that rule riparian ecosystems. Image a fur-covered torpedo the size of a shin-high tube sock. With canines as sharp as a briar thorn and a tail like a rudder, mink swim at super speeds and might reduce with precision, permitting them to ambush trout, bass, minnows, and different fish. On land, they seem as miniature otters, bounding with hunched backs as they search each burrow, root overhang, and rock ledge for residing prey.
The place they exist, muskrats are on the high of the checklist, however mink additionally take pleasure in crayfish, rabbits, mice, rats, and frogs. One clip even exhibits a very feisty mink taking down a full-grown swan. Fur trappers have lengthy revered mink for his or her silky, dense, and insulative pelt, which usually fetches honest costs on the fur market. When Loomis found the mink skulls within the shell mound, they most likely appeared acquainted, however as a paleontologist who had dealt with quite a few specimens of widespread mink in his profession, he couldn’t make sense of their extraordinary dimension.
Loomis estimated the skulls in his shell heap had been anyplace between 200 to 400 years outdated. Because the depth of the shell heap indicated it was used for a number of centuries, he hypothesized that Native Individuals regularly harvested this terribly massive mink over that point interval. He famous that each cranium had a damaged braincase, indicating that the Native Individuals harvested the mind for meals or different functions.
He additionally recognized abrasions on the decrease mandibles that prompt the mink had been stripped of its cover and scraped of its flesh. Loomis took arduous notes and processed the specimens again at his workplace. Then, three years later, he printed a analysis paper on his findings. In it, he declared he had discovered a brand new and extinct subspecies. He referred to as it Lutreola imaginative and prescient antiquus, or “historical mink.”
It’s not clear whether or not Loomis knew it or not, however a number of years earlier than his discovery, one other scientist, doctor, and zoologist named Daniel Prentiss, collected the same set of mysterious mink bones in a shell heap simply 100 miles up the shore. Like Loomis’s bones, the specimens Prentiss collected appeared similar to mink, however considerably bigger. That they had strong jaws and big enamel. Not like Loomis, who interpreted the skulls as a subspecies of the widespread mink, Prentiss recognized his specimen as a wholly new species. He named it Lutreola macradon, that means “mink with massive enamel.”
No information counsel that Prentiss and Loomis ever duked out their taxonomic disagreement, however they sparked a heated debate that continues to at the present time. Since their respective discoveries, dozens of enormous mink specimens have been collected in shell heaps from as far north as Canada and as far south as Connecticut. They’ve been present in affiliation with bivalves and different meals, usually containing the butchered stays of moose, seal, and beaver. All researchers agree that the massive mink specimens, now dubbed the ocean mink, are undoubtedly massive, however the scientific neighborhood is cut up. Is the ocean mink merely a big number of widespread mink, like these present in Alaska, or is it one thing else solely?
Sea Mink in Historical past
Journey again 200 years, and also you’ll discover a Maine coast very like the one which exists right now. Waves crash upon its rocky shores, spouting briny sea spray that permeates the air. The thick air looms over the tidal swimming pools and lays like a blanket over the bays. It infiltrates the townhomes and the individuals who have made a cushty residing off the ocean since Maine was settled in 1607.
Nineteenth-century Mainers constructed ships and fished for cod. They created island communities and trapped lobster. However at a time when the American fur commerce was in full swing, as fur trappers pushed into the uncharted territory of the Rocky Mountain west seeking beaver fur, Mainers discovered their very own prospects. They trapped beaver and otter within the wetlands. They trapped fisher and pine marten within the forests. And on the rocky shores, they trapped sea mink.
“Some seventy-five years in the past, and for a few years thereafter, my father, who was a fur-buyer, used to have almost all of the furs taken on the islands of Penobscot Bay, from the the mouth of the Penobscot eastward to Frenchman’s Bay,” Manly Hardy wrote in a 1903 subject of Forest and Stream. “Most of the mink, particularly from Swan’s Island and Marshall’s Island, had been totally twice as massive because the mink from inland, the smallest of them being as massive as the most important inland mink and the most important totally twice the dimensions of their inland family.”
Hardy is extensively accredited as the primary particular person to attach the discoveries of sea mink bones with historic accounts. In his article, Hardy explains that the ocean mink furs had been a lot redder and extra coarse than widespread mink fur. He states that Maine trappers referred to as inland mink “woods mink” to tell apart them from the massive sea mink, and that sea mink had been unusually fats and had a fishy stench.
Hardy additionally described how they had been harvested. As an alternative of typical traps, Mainers most well-liked to ambush sea mink at their rocky shoreline dens and hunt them with canines. Hardy made a stout case for the differential traits between sea mink and their inland counterparts, however as for the conclusions of Prentiss, he couldn’t be extra clear. He aligned himself staunchly with Loomis: “My opinion is that the so-called new mink is nothing kind of than the cranium of certainly one of these massive mink.”
Thirty-two years later and 25 years after Hardy’s dying, his daughter shared her opinions with Arthur Stupka, a naturalist at Acadia Nationwide Park. “My father laughed at inferences drawn from a single cranium,” she mentioned. “As to their being styled ‘species macradon,’ or ‘massive toothed,’ after all an animal twice as massive as one other of the identical type would have greater enamel and a much bigger cranium!”
Within the over one-hundred years since Hardy’s article, many sea mink specimens have been discovered, and students have regularly tried to justify their presence in some historic context. Over time, the items have began to return collectively. In response to a 1966 report printed by america Pure Museum, the Abenaki, Indigenous Folks of Maine, had a selected identify for the ocean mink. They referred to as it mousebeysoo, that means “moist factor.”
Sir Humphrey Gilbert, an English adventurer, is assumed to have encountered a sea mink throughout his voyage to Newfoundland in 1853. In his notes, he writes a couple of seafaring creature that he describes as a “fish-like greyhound.”
Joseph Banks, a naturalist, and explorer who took half within the well-known voyages of Captain Prepare dinner, can also be thought to have encountered a sea mink. Throughout a voyage alongside the Strait of Belle Isle in 1776, he described a fur-bearing water critter and likewise described it as one thing like a greyhound within the water.
By all accounts, students appear to agree that regardless of the sea mink actually was, it endured till no less than the 1860s, after which sightings dropped off precipitously. Students additionally agree that the final sea mink harvested was round 1880, close to Jonesport, Maine. Regardless of some scant and doubtful studies bleeding into the twentieth century, the ocean mink was declared extinct later that 12 months.
The Finish of the Sea Mink Debate
Turner Farm, an natural livestock and vegetable farm in North Haven, Maine, lies on high of an archeological web site inhabited for over 5,000 years. The location accommodates a shell midden, and its bones and shells pour out into Penobscot Bay as erosion tears away its shores. The Turner Farm shell midden is rife with artifacts, together with one of many richest assortment of sea mink bones ever found.
In 2007, Dr. Rebecca Sealfon of Princeton College collected 100 sea mink mandibles from the Turner Farm web site. Then, she collected jaw bones from trendy mink and fossilized, extinct species from the identical household. She took 13 dental measurements on all of her specimens and utilized statistical evaluation to her knowledge, quantifying the dental variations between the species. Her analysis aimed to place the one-hundred-year taxonomic debate to relaxation and eventually reply the query as as to whether or not the ocean mink actually was its personal species.
Her outcomes left little doubt. The ocean mink specimens had statistically distinctive dentition. Particularly, the ocean mink specimens had broader carnassials, the slicing enamel particular to carnivores, than the opposite mink species. She attributes this to the ocean mink’s distinctive weight loss program, which seemingly concerned crushing hard-shelled and hard-bodied ocean prey. Compared, widespread mink have smaller enamel, higher fitted to inland and riparian quarry.
Dental divergence clearly signifies speciation, Dr. Sealfon defined in her paper, and probably the most important results of her analysis is that it seals the taxonomic destiny of the ocean mink. Discover any scientific paper that mentions the ocean mink right now, and it’ll use the nomenclature imbued by Daniel Prentiss over 100 years in the past, with the up to date genus for mink, Neogale macradon, or “mink with massive enamel.” A species of its personal.
Some nonetheless preserve that the ocean mink actually was only a massive ol’ mink and that legends of a seafaring “sea mink” are pure fantasy. Others declare that a couple of sea mink nonetheless slip across the oceanic islands surrounding Maine. Regardless, regardless of the a whole lot of bones pried from eroding shell middens and the a whole lot of researchers who’ve sought out after it, nobody has ever procured a full, wholly preserved specimen of a sea mink. For now, its legacy lies within the bones within the shell middens, in scholarly hypothesis and debate, and within the forgotten reminiscences of Maine’s early fur trappers.
Function picture is by way of the Smithsonian Institute’s Clark Assortment.
