When allready talking about new penniped, my under the radar pipedream one is the south american sealion with their main selling point being the reddish brown manes of the males and there range covering a completly new region for the game in the coasts of south america. They are on average roughly 1,5 times the weight of a californian sealion and quite a bit more bulky in their build. With 81 worldwide holdings they also have quite the captive population as the third most common pinniped in captivity and the most common in south america.
Funfact! There are only a few pinnipeds that are held in more then 15 zoos, eventhough most species are held in atleast a few zoos with the Californian Sealion being the runaway winner with 163 holdings and only the east attlantic harbourseal with 111 holdings as the only other one making it past the 100, with potentially more but i left out the other subspecies as i do not know which ones actually count as subspecies. The ingame grey seal with its 38 holdings having just 4 more then the 34 of the walrus, so much to the walrus "being too uncommon in zoos" bit. The northern fur seal joins aso with 34, just one more then the 33 of the brown fur seal and 4 more then the 30 of the south american fur seal. The spotted seal has 27 holdings, allmost all being in asia or russia with only 2 holdings in north america and lastly with 21 we have the stellers sealion, the 10. and last pinniped that passes 15 holdings.
Its pretty fascinating how warped the view on this group can be as allmost every member is held in atleast one zoo, most of the time somewhere in or near their range as what i assume often are rescues, for example the 4 current holdings of elephant seals pretty neatly overlap with their breeding ranges, but only very few are acutally kept across multiple continents. Personally id love atleast one more non walrus pinniped to have some representation for the southern hemisphere, with either the maned sealion for just being hella cool and distinct with its mane or the brown fur seal for covering both parts of southern africa and oceania, but i can also totally understand anyone whos allready satisfied with what we currently got. But hey with all this talk about a south america pack i really woulldnt be mad about the south america sea lion as one of the packs clones. Defenetly more exciting then a bush dog and even the spectacle bear easily and would bring some representation to a completly untouched part of current south america and might even entice more people to use african penguins as humbold penguin standins.
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I'm leaving Steller's Sea Eagles and Puffins to delusions 
