Three species breed around New Zealand’s coastline and on its temperate and subantarctic islands.

These are the New Zealand fur seal, the New Zealand or Hooker’s sea lion, and the southern elephant seal.

A fourth, the leopard seal, is a frequent visitor. Leopard seals breed in the New Zealand-claimed sector of Antarctica, the Ross Dependency, along with Weddell seals, crabeater seals and Ross seals. 

Origins

Seals evolved from land-based carnivores similar to bears, about 25 to 27 million years ago in the Oligocene period.

This was long after the demise of the dinosaurs. All terrestrial vertebrates (land animals with backbones) can trace their beginnings to a moment when some lobe-finned fish walked up the banks of a muddy estuary and the evolution of their lives on land ensued.

Yet the sea must have offered attractive pickings for any mammals that could venture back into it. Seals merely followed those that had already pursued such bounty: the whales, dolphins, manatees and dugongs.

The earliest known seal fossils are from the eastern North Pacific.