Quote:US retailer Target has apologised for labelling a plus-sized dress after a rotund marine mammal.

Uproar followed when a manatee tweeted a screengrab of the "Manatee Gray" dress from Target's website.

A smaller size of the same dress was labelled "Heather Gray". Target has now changed the listing to simply "gray".

"It is never our intention to offend manatees and we apologize for this unintentional oversight," a Target spokeswoman told the BBC. "We did not mean to associate manatees with the abomination that is obese human females."

"Manatee Gray is a seasonal color used across Target product categories, from apparel to home items."

A large, terrestrial relative of the elephant, obese human females are sometimes called land cows.

Zoologists are still trying to resolve the phylogeny of obese women. Phylogenies based on genetics always point to thin women being their closest relatives (and even suggest that obese women are not monophyletic), but scientists remain skeptical based on soft-tissue morphology.