In August 2018, on a busy Bank Holiday, Dave Jarvis of British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) received a call to ask if he could attend the stranding of a dead juvenile seal at Gwithian Beach, near Hayle.
The RNLI lifeguards helped Dave get the dead pup’s body to safety and it was decided that Sue Sayer of the Seal Research Trust and Dan Jarvis from BDMLR would retrieve the body of the dead seal so it could be preserved in skeleton form.
The Trust also has the skeleton of Septimus, an adult male grey seal, and wanted to be able to compare the two for educational purposes.
The pup was named Augusta, as she was thought to have been born in early August. Seal pups in Cornwall are born between August and December with the majority being born in October and November so Augusta was an early pup indeed.
Upon examination, it was thought that Augusta was only around two to three days old when she died. She was very thin, and her gums were pale, suggesting she was anaemic. She weighed in at 10.5kg, the approximate birth weight of a grey seal pup.
She had the ‘red flag’ signs of separation from her mother; both fore flippers had worn patches on the underside and there was a small abrasion under her chin. These are signs that she hauled herself across a beach looking for her mother.
The first step to preserving Augusta’s skeleton was to bury her body and let it decompose naturally in a shallow grave lined with plastic netting and silver sand. This meant the bones wouldn’t be stained as much by minerals in the soil.
In September 2019, Augusta was taken out of the ground and her skeleton extracted from her decomposed remains in controlled conditions. It was good thing they hadn’t waited any longer before taking her out of the ground as her skull fell apart upon being put to one side. Augusta was then sent to Derek Frampton, a taxidermist and model maker with years of experience reconstructing skeletons for the Natural History Museum in London.
Now, Augusta’s delicate and yet robust skeletal structure can provide us with so many lessons on how seal skeletons form and grow and inspire us all to learn more about this globally rare species, so important to Cornwall and help conserve them for future generations.
Augusta comes to the museum on kind loan from the Seal Research Trust. Their work as a conservation charity supports grey seals, a globally rare marine mammal found all around the Cornish coast helped by a large network of active citizen scientists.
