A huge walrus was spotted off the coast of western Ireland on Sunday – the first confirmed sighting of the tusk orphans in the country, a report said.
The marine mammal was discovered on rocks along Valentia Island in Kerry, witnesses told the Irish Independent.
“He jumped out of the water onto the rocks and gave us a bit of a show,” Alan Houlihan told the newspaper.
“At first I thought it was a seal and then we saw the tusks,” said Houlihan, who was with his 5-year-old daughter when they saw the walrus.
Marine biologist Kevin Flannery, the director of a local aquarium, told the outlet that Sunday’s discovery is “the first confirmed sighting of a walrus” in Ireland.
“It’s unbelievable … it’s a one-off as far as I’m concerned.”
Flannery theorizes that the Walrus accidentally traveled from the Arctic on an iceberg.
“He’s from the Arctic,” Flannery told the newspaper. “I’d say he fell asleep on an iceberg and drifted away, and then he had gone too far, to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or something like that near Greenland.”