Complete mitochondrial genome of the Galápagos sea lion, (Carnivora, Otariidae): paratype specimen confirms separate species status.

The endangered Galápagos sea lion () inhabits the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. We present a complete mitochondrial genome (16 465 bp) of a female paratype from the collections of the Natural History Museum Oslo, Norway, assembled from next-generation sequencing reads. It contains all canonical protein-coding, rRNA, tRNA genes, and the D-loop region. Sequence similarity is 99.93% to a previously published conspecific mitogenome sequence and 99.37% to the mitogenome sequence of the sister species . Sequence similarity of the D-loop region of the paratype mitogenome is >99%, while the sequence difference to the sequences exceeds 2.5%. The paratype mitogenome sequence supports the taxonomic status of as a separate species.