The extinct sea mink, Neogale macrodon : a putative specimen in the New Brunswick Museum, Canada, confirmed as American mink, Neogale vison

Neogale macrodon: a putative specimen in the New Brunswick Museum, Canada, confirmed as American mink, Neogale vison KEYWORDS: Clarence Hall Clarkextinct mammalsgenetic barcoding -Mustela macrodontaxidermyzooarchaeology.The sea mink, now Neogale macrodon (Prentiss, 1903), was described by Daniel Webster Prentiss (1843-1899) based on a fragmentary skull from an Indigenous coastal shell midden in Maine, USA (Prentiss 1903).Prentiss (1903) placed the sea mink in the genus Lutreola, and it was subsequently included in Mustela (Manville 1966; Kurtén and Anderson 1980; Mead et al. 2000), Neovison (Sealfron 2007) and Neogale (Patterson et al. 2021).The sea mink was apparently hunted to extinction as early as 1860, although it may have survived until about 1920 (Seton 1921; Manville 1966).Believed to have been a large, coarse-pelaged mustelid with reddish fur (Hardy 1903), N. macrodon was reported to have been restricted to coastal habitats in northeastern North America.Its native range has been variously proposed as from northern Connecticut, USA, northwards to southwestern Nova Scotia or possibly even Newfoundland in Canada (Waters and Ray 1961; Waters and Mack 1962; Manville 1966; Banfield 1974).However, Black et al. (1998) argued that its distribution was much more restricted, being confined to eastern USA from Massachusetts north to the Machias-Quoddy region in Maine, a coastal range of only about 400 km.Prompted by various early accounts of the sea mink, Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946) urged a search for extant specimens, especially prepared and mounted examples (Seton 1921).Clarence Hull Clark (1863-1933), 1 a Maine businessman, an Associate Member of the American Ornithologists Union and a notable local naturalist, had such a specimen in his private collectionthe mounted skin (Figure 1) was reported to have come from an animal that had been taken in 1894 on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, in the Bay of Fundy. 2 Considered to be a unique example of Neogale macrodon, Keene (1929) estimated the value of the mounted skin as 'beyond price'.After Clark's death his collection passed to his grandson, James Clark Sullivan (1932-2008).About 1965, Sullivan, believing the specimen to be of considerable monetary value, approached the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, with an offer to sell the entire Clark collection.After carefully examining the supposed sea mink, Richard Hyde Manville (1910-1974), Director of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service's Bird and Mammal Laboratories, concluded that the 'lengendary [sic]' specimen represented 'an unusually large (probably adult male) specimen of the present mink, M. vison' (American mink) or perhaps 'an intergrade between the sea mink and M. vison' (Manville 1966: 8).Regardless, in the same paper Manville (1966) synonymized what is now referred to as Neogale vison and N. macrodon, designating the latter as a subspecies (coastal form) of N. vison.Although zooarchaeologists continued to recognize the skeletal remains of a large