Manatí: an animal outside the authorities, described from the Caribbean in the 1520s

Oviedo opens his manatee chapter by saying that neither Pliny nor Albertus Magnus wrote of this animal and that Spain has none. He then records flippers in place of arms, hide without scales, grazing at the river bank, two teats on the chest of the female with young suckled at them, and the remora fishery that took the animal, along with the meat trade, the medicinal ear-stones, and a past tense about the Indians of Hispaniola.