Hippopotamus antiquus

Hippopotamus antiquus
Hippopotamus antiquus (Museum of Geology and Paleontology, Florence )
Systematics
Subclass : Higher mammals (Eutheria) Superordinate : Laurasiatheria Order : Artiodactyla (Artiodactyla) Family : Hippos (Hippopotamidae) Genre : Hippopotamus Type : Hippopotamus antiquus
Scientific name
Hippopotamus antiquus
Desmarest , 1822

Hippopotamus antiquus , sometimes also called the European hippopotamus , was a hippopotamus that waswidespreadin Europe from the Pliocene to the Middle Pleistocene .

Skull of Hippopotamus antiquus
(Museum of Geology and Paleontology, Florence)

The distribution area reached from the Balkan Peninsula over the Rhine - Weser area to the British Isles , the Rhone Valley , the Apennine Peninsula and the Iberian Peninsula . While H. antiquus is still preferred by Kurtén as a subspecies of H. amphibius , younger specialist authors assume a species of its own.

Apparently there have been different waves of immigration of the genus Hippopotamus following one another from Africa . On the one hand, it was assumed that with the same habitat and the same food source, different species overlapped in the distribution area and, on the contrary, only one species existed in the respective time period.

Because of the sometimes difficult differentiation, for example with H. major and H. incognitus , a clear assignment to the individual species is often difficult. In Germany, the sites on the Upper Rhine , in Würzburg (Schalksberg) in Lower Franconia and Meiningen in Untermaßfeld are known. Of these, at least the Lower Franconian fossils were assigned to H. antiquus with reservation after weighing the evidence . The paleontological records of the fossils in the Main Plain are temporally assigned to the Cromer complex . H. antiquus is said to have been replaced by H. incognitus , which appeared later in the West and Central European settlement area . Fossils in the Val d'Arno are dated to the Villafranchium .

H. antiquus is described as "gigantic" in its habitus. Accordingly, it is said to have been the largest modern species of the genus Hippopotamus . The animals reached a head-trunk length of 4 meters and weighed 4 tons. These values ​​are partly exceeded by H. amphibius , but H. antiquus is said to have been larger on average .

literature

• Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest : Mammalogie ou description des espèces de mammifères. Paris 1822, pp. 277-555
• Ralf-Dietrich Kahlke: The lower Pleistocene hippopotamus remains from Würzburg-Schalksberg. Weimar [1989]
• Karla Christina Reimann, Friedrich Strauch : A hippopotamus skull from the Pliocene of Elis (Peloponnese, Greece). In: New Yearbook for Geology and Paleontology - Treatises , Volume 249, Issue 2, 2008, pp. 203–222

Web links

Commons : Hippopotamus antiquus  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Björn Kurtén : Pleistocene mammals of Europe. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968, p. 156.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Martine Faure: Hippopotamus incognitus nov. sp., un hippopotame (Mammalia, Artiodactyla) du Pléistocène d'Europe occidentale. In: Geobios Volume 17, Part 4, 1984, pp. 427-437.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Kahlke [1989] (lit.).
4. ↑ Wighart von Koenigswald , M. Löscher: Jungpleistozäne hippopotamus finds from the Upper Rhine plain and their biogeographical significance. In: N. Jb.Geol.Paleont. Abh. 163/3, Stuttgart 1982, pp. 331-348.
5. ↑ Ralf-Dietrich Kahlke: The lower Pleistocene hippopotamus remains of Untermaßfeld near Meiningen - A contribution to the research, development and distribution history of fossil hippepotamids in Europe. ( Dissertation at the Ernst Moritz Arndt University ) Greifswald 1987.