Tusked Bunyips and Southern Walruses

There is a subcategory of Bunyip sightings that has been stated all along and it never seems anybody ever notices the implications: some Bunyips are consistently describred as having long ivory tusks like a walrus. The depiction at left is from Deviant Art is impressive but it basically is depicting one of these walrus-creatures and including the (unattested) tail. As I point out below, even the flippers shown are about equivalent of walrus flippers.

Sometimes it seems that such sightings are ascribed to major geographic confusion, but it has been mooted about for most of the twentieth century that there might be a Southern-hemisphere equivalent to the arctic Walrus, an ecological replacement derived from the sealions that perhaps evolved similar tusks in parallel to the ones we were more familiar with. The discussion may not have moved very far outside of Southern Australia, Tasmania,and Nrew Zealand

Folklorists at least have recognised the situation was unusual, and Thor Heyerdahl quotes the Maori tradition of the Marakai-Hau as being evidence of cultural contact between Polynesians and NW Coastal Amerinds. However, that soultion does not account for such reports and representations of walrus-tusked Bunyips as we see here.(once again, the version at left includes the traditional but actually unreported tail)

There is a residuum of reports found in In The Wake of the Sea Serpents which sound rather like tuskless walruses reported in Southern waters: off South Africa they are sometimes called "Waterhorses" (Merhorses) and some have been reported by Japanese boats sailing the Anatarctic Ocean, but  the reports were ignored because, as they were told, they could not have seen Anatarctic walruses because such things do not exist. However in many of these cases not only do the descriptions of the tusks match, sometimes as in these Bunyip cases, the shape of the flippers as indicated do match walrus' flippers.

Curiously, early Spanish
explorers also attributed walruses
to Patagonia, once again with the tail (Explorers in Northern waters also used to attribute an extended tail onto the more familiar walruses-which we know today do NOT have the tails)
http://patagoniamonsters.blogspot.com/2010/09/patagonian-walrus.html