''Hippopotamus creutzburgi'', the Cretan dwarf hippopotamus, is an extinct species of

hippopotamus The hippopotamus ( ; : hippopotamuses or hippopotami; ''Hippopotamus amphibius''), also called the hippo, common hippopotamus, or river hippopotamus, is a large semiaquatic mammal native to sub-Saharan Africa. It is one of only two extant ...

from the island of

Crete Crete ( el, Κρήτη, translit=, Modern: , Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the 88th largest island in the world and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, Sardinia, Cypru ...

. ''Hippopopotamus'' colonized Crete probably 800,000 years ago and lived there during the

Middle Pleistocene The Chibanian, widely known by its previous designation of Middle Pleistocene, is an age in the international geologic timescale or a stage in chronostratigraphy, being a division of the Pleistocene Epoch within the ongoing Quaternary Period. Th ...

. Bones of ''H. creutzburgi'' were found by

Dorothea Bate Dorothea Minola Alice Bate FGS (8 November 1878 – 13 January 1951), also known as Dorothy Bate, was a Welsh palaeontologist and pioneer of archaeozoology. Her life's work was to find fossils of recently extinct mammals with a view to underst ...

on the Katharo plateau, in eastern Crete, in the 1900s.Bate, D.M.A., (1905): I. Four and a half months in Crete in search of Pleistocene mammalian remains. Geol. Mag. 2: 13-204. A similar species, the Cyprus dwarf hippopotamus (''Phanourios minor'') lived on the island of Cyprus until the Holocene. It was at least 20% smaller than either subspecies of Cretan hippo.

References

Extinct hippopotamuses Pleistocene even-toed ungulates Prehistoric mammals of Europe Prehistoric Crete Fossil taxa described in 1966 {{Paleo-eventoedungulate-stub

See also

References