The 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 is the only dugong in captivity...
Science: The Original Mermaid
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