fur seal

noun

: any of various eared seals that have a double coat with a dense soft underfur and were hunted especially formerly for their desirable pelts:

: a large seal (Callorhinus ursinus) of the northern Pacific Ocean having its main breeding rookery on Pribilof Island in the Bering Sea

called also northern fur seal

: any of a genus (Arctocephalus) of seals chiefly of the southern hemisphere

called also southern fur seal

Examples of fur seal in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web Chinstrap penguins and fur seals face similar stresses. —

Joshua Goodman, Fortune, 13 Oct. 2023 Get up close and personal with Australia's unique wildlife on Kangaroo Island's nature reserve and see koalas, wallabies, kangaroos, fur seals, penguins, and kookaburras. —

Patricia Doherty, Travel + Leisure, 12 Oct. 2023 Thus far this year, SeaWorld San Diego has rescued 54 sea lions, 16 northern elephant seals, six fur seals, three sea turtles, one dolphin and one harbor seal. —

Emily Alvarenga, San Diego Union-Tribune, 16 Sep. 2023 Researchers know that creatures like dolphins manage to sleep in the ocean by turning off only half of their brains at a time, while fur seals can sometimes sleep with their whole brain, and sometimes with only half. —

Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover Magazine, 28 Aug. 2023 Thus far this year, SeaWorld San Diego has rescued 51 sea lions, 14 northern elephant seals, six fur seals, three sea turtles, one dolphin and one harbor seal. —

Emily Alvarenga, San Diego Union-Tribune, 5 Aug. 2023 Now comes a fascinating, full history of the fur seal story, pitting artist and advocate Henry Wood Elliott against the most famous of the seal pirates, a man named Alex MacLean, and a whole host of ill-informed and corrupt business and political titans. —

Nancy Lord, Anchorage Daily News, 2 Apr. 2022 Before the crab and pollock fisheries, Russian explorers arrived in the 18th century to harvest fur seals. —

Scott McMurren, Anchorage Daily News, 3 June 2023 Take the hundreds of Cape fur seal carcasses that washed up on Namibia’s coastline early last year. —

Marion Renault, The New Republic, 3 May 2023 See More

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'fur seal.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.