Cryptozoology Animal of Discovery: Pygmy Hippopotamus

Posting a baby picture is always a good idea on a Sunday on the first day of the month.

Here, Anais, the mother hippo, keeps an eye on her son Aldo, a three-week-old pygmy hippopotamus, (Choeropsis liberiensis), at the Vincennes zoo, outside Paris, on Tuesday, June 26, 2007.

Aldo looks, eats and takes it easy like a hippopotamus. But he is only about as big as a human baby, at 21 inches.

This pygmy hippopotamus, born on June 5, is one of only a few dozen in Europe, bred in a special program to boost the rare species, since less than 3000 now live in the wild. His older brothers, now 7 and 6 years old, live in Spain and Britain. The fact that Aldo is a male is good news to the European breeding program. Since the project started in the early 90s, there have been 46 males born and 66 females. Aldo is the 47th male of the species in captivity.

The pygmy hippopotamus, as I have mentioned before, is a good example of a little-remembered cryptozoological success story.

The account begins with Karl Hagenbeck, a famous German animal dealer, who established a zoological garden near Hamburg, the prototype of the modern open-air zoo. In 1909, Hagenbeek sent German naturalist-explorer Hans Schomburgk to Liberia to check on rumors about the nigbwe, a “giant black pig.”

After two years of jungle pursuit Schomburgk finally spotted the animal 30 feet in front of him. It was big, shiny, and black, but the animal clearly was related to the hippopotamus, not the pig. Unable to catch it, he went home to Hamburg empty-handed.

Finally, in 1912, Schomburgk returned to Liberia and, to the dismay of his critics, captured a pygmy hippopotamus on March 1, 1913, and then returned to Europe in August with five live pygmy hippos.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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