County Museum of Natural History diorama of a simple red room wedged between a taxidermied wolf pack in the mountains on one side and polar bears on ice floes on the other.

The sinking of the Endurance, months after the ship became trapped in ice, stranded Shackleton and 27 crew members on ice floes and dashed their hopes of becoming the first to cross Antarctica on foot.

Members of the public alerted the local authorities when they saw a man going onto an ice floe to approach the animal.

On ice floes, mothers and pups can spread out over a larger area and the pups face fewer threats from other predators, humans, or infections that are easily spread in dense seal colonies on land.

The iconic Arctic species normally feed on ringed seals that they catch on ice floes offshore.