The seriously endangered Mediterranean monk seal has not been recorded off Libya since 1810. Mr Norris lived in Libya in 1966–68, and is able to report regular offshore sightings on the inaccessible Marmarican coast, two occasions in the early 1960s when a ‘strange fish’ with ‘whiskers like a man’ and a cry ‘like a woman’ hauled up on a beach within Tobruk harbour, and one established breeding colony of 20 or more animals living in submarine offshore caves, known to local fishermen and never molested by them.