Hippopotamus minor (Cypriot Pygmy Hippopotamus)

[another specialist]

The Cyprus Dwarf Hippopotamus or Cypriot Pygmy Hippopotamus (Hippopotamus minor) is an extinct species of hippo that inhabited the island of Cyprus until the early Holocene.

The 200 kilogram (440 lbs) Cyprus Dwarf Hippo was roughly the same size as the extant pygmy hippopotamus. Unlike the modern pygmy hippo, it is thought that the Cyprus Dwarf became small through the process of insular dwarfism which is caused by gene pools limited to a small environment. This same process is believed to cause the dwarfism found in some dwarf elephants, the Pygmy Mammoth, and Homo floresiensis. The animal is estimated to have measured 76 centimetres tall and 121 centimetres long.[2]

At the time of its extinction between 11,000 and 9,000 years ago, the Cyprus Dwarf Hippo was the largest animal on the island of Cyprus. The herbivorous Cyprus Dwarf Hippo had no natural predators. [3]

Excavation sites on Cyprus, particularly Aetokremnos, provide evidence that the Cyprus Dwarf Hippo may have encountered and been driven to extinction by the early human residents of Cyprus.[4]

A similar species of hippo, the Cretan Dwarf Hippopotamus (Hippopotamus creutzburgi) existed on the island of Crete, but became extinct during the Pleistocene.


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprus_Dwarf_Hippopotamus

[another specialist]

admin said:

Dwarf hippo fossils found on Cyprus
By MENELAOS HADJICOSTIS, Associated Press Writer
Wed Dec 5, 11:17 PM ET

An abattoir used by early Cypriots, a place where animals went to die, or a shelter that ultimately proved a death trap?

Cypriot and Greek scientists are studying a collapsed cave filled with the fossilized remains of extinct dwarf hippopotamuses — descendants of hippos believed to have reached the island a quarter-million years ago.

Paleontologists have unearthed an estimated 80 dwarf hippos in recent digs at the site just outside the resort of Ayia Napa on the island's southeastern coast. Hundreds more may lie beneath an exposed layer of jumbled fossils.

Scientists hope the fossil haul, tentatively dated to 9,000-11,500 B.C., could offer clues to when humans first set foot on this Mediterranean island.

"It's about our origins," said Ioannis Panayides, the Cyprus Geological Survey Department official in charge of the excavations in conjunction with the University of Athens. "Knowledge of our geological history makes us more knowledgeable about ourselves."

Until the Ayia Napa discovery, the earliest trace of humans on Cyprus dated to 8,000 B.C. But signs of human activity at the new dig could turn back the clock on the first Cypriots by as much as 3,500 years.

"That's very significant, but we can't be certain yet. The task of examining is laborious and time consuming," said University of Athens Professor George Theodorou, who is tasked with examining some 1.5 tons of fossils.

The dwarf hippopotamuses were herbivores, like their modern cousins, but were only about 2 1/2 feet tall and 4 feet long. Unlike modern hippos, whose upturned nostrils seem designed for swimming, Cypriot hippos had low-slung nostrils better suited to foraging on land.

Panayides said the fossils show the Cypriot hippos had legs and feet adapted to land, enabling them to stand on their hind legs to reach tree branches.

Experts believe hippos arrived on Cyprus between 100,000 to 250,000 ago, and likely got smaller to adapt to the hilly island landscape. But scientists do not know how the animals reached Cyprus, which has never been physically linked to another land mass.

Panayides said paleontologists theorize hippos may have swum or floated here during a Pleistocene ice age from land that is now Turkey or Syria. They may have clung to tree trunks and other debris during the crossing.

Lower sea levels at the time made Cyprus much larger than its present 3,570 square miles, meaning it was much closer to other lands. By some estimates, what is now Syria was a mere 18 miles away.

Digs over the last century uncovered smaller numbers of dwarf hippo fossils at 40 locations across Cyprus. One cave found 20 years ago had evidence of fire, stone tools and scorched bones indicating dwarf hippos were hunted by humans.

Carbon dating on those hippo fossils showed the site dated to 8,000 B.C. Evidence of human activity at Ayia Napa means the island may have been settled by humans as much as 3,500 years earlier.

A human footprint at the Ayia Napa site could bolster the theory that the island's earliest inhabitants could have driven the dwarf hippos to extinction through hunting, said Panayides.

"If these new bones are found to be older than bones previously discovered and scientists can find an association with humans, then the discovery has the potential to tell us more about the island's first human inhabitants," said Eleanor Weston, a paleontologist at London's Natural History Museum who was not connected with the Ayia Napa discovery.

Panayides said indications that hippo bones at Ayia Napa had been crushed as if trampled by other hippos, suggesting successive generations came to the cave. Shelter is the most likely explanation, but Panayides didn't rule out the possibility the hippos returned to an ancient burial ground to die.


Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071206/ap_on_sc/cyprus_dwarf_hippos

[another specialist]

donsmaps.com/bcmammoth.html

[another specialist]

Faunal Extinction in an Island Society: Pygmy Hippopotamus Hunters of Cyprus By Alan H. Simmons

books.google.com/books?id=hCwYwyEBXEAC&pg=PA372&lpg=PA372&dq=megaceros+cazioti+holocene&source=web&ots=cYNC0iGBbP&sig=J9Sr8Ssxqa_IRlHMZP4UdZZInBY#PPP1,M1

tinyurl.com/3c6llu

[Deleted]

Here are several pictures including a very nice reconstruction of the whole animal.:

www.dinosaurexperts.com/Pigmy%20hippo.htm#skeleton

BTW: The name must be Phanourios minutis, not Hippopotamus minor. Hippopotamus minor is a synonym for the African Dwarf Hippo.

[another specialist]

noisi said:

Here are several pictures including a very nice reconstruction of the whole animal.:

www.dinosaurexperts.com/Pigmy%20hippo.htm#skeleton

BTW: The name must be Phanourios minutis, not Hippopotamus minor. Hippopotamus minor is a synonym for the African Dwarf Hippo.

Thanks Noisi for the link


RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PYGMY HIPPOPOTAMUS OF CYPRUS (PHANOURIOS MINUTIS)

The Pygmy Hippopotamus of Cyprus

(Phanourios minutis)

Description


A dwarf species of hippopotamus, Phanourios minutis, existed on the island of Cyprus. Its size was small, about 1.5m length and 0.75m height and was believed to live on land and not be amphibious as today’s hippos.

The word hippopotamus comes from the Greek words 'hippos' and 'potamos', which means river horse.

The English Palaeontologist Dorothea Bate traveled to Cyprus in 1901 where she discovered, on the north part of the island, the fossilized remains of pygmy hippos and elephants. The name of the hippo of Cyprus was derived from the area that it was found – Saint. Phanourios which is a place near Kyrenia. A reconstructed skeleton of the pygmy hippo can be found in the Natural History Museum of London.

Remains of the animal are found in various places in Cyprus (more than 32 places) especially in caves.

Phanourios minutis became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. Whether this was caused by human intervention or not is debated but at Aetokremnos, a rock shelter near Limassol on the southern coast of Cyprus, bones of pygmy hippopotamuses (Phanourios minutis), pygmy elephants (Elephas cypriotes) and artifacts were found together. There are no bones with marks of butchery but there is an unusually high number of burned bones of pygmy hippos. It is estimated that the bones found at this side belonged to about 100 to 120 pygmy hippopotamuses of various ages and 3 young pygmy elephants. A large number of radiocarbon dating settles the date of the bones at 10.500 BC.



Reconstructed skeleton of the pygmy hippo (Natural History Museum of London).



Remains of Phanourios minutis, displayed in Cyprus Museums



Reconstructed animal

[another specialist]

noisi said:

Here are several pictures including a very nice reconstruction of the whole animal.:

www.dinosaurexperts.com/Pigmy%20hippo.htm#skeleton

BTW: The name must be Phanourios minutis, not Hippopotamus minor. Hippopotamus minor is a synonym for the African Dwarf Hippo.

Thread has been renamed

[surroundx]

Direct Dating and Physico-Chemical Analyses Cast Doubts on the Coexistence of Humans and Dwarf Hippos in Cyprus

Abstract

In the Mediterranean, the island dwarf megafaunas became extinct around the end of the Pleistocene, during a period of rapid and global climate change. In Cyprus, this coincided with the first human presence on the island, as attested by the rock shelter of Akrotiri-Aetokremnos where an Epipaleolithic anthropogenic layer (stratum 2) was found overlying a massive accumulation of pygmy hippopotamus (Phanourios minor (Desmarest, 1822)) [Boekschoten and Sondaar, 1972] bones (stratum 4). The relationship between the two layers is highly controversial and the role played by humans in hippo extinction remains fiercely debated. Here, we provide new, direct radiocarbon and physico-chemical analyses on calcined bones which elucidates the complex depositional history of the assemblage. Bone turquoise was identified using micro-PIXE analysis and depth-profiling together with Vis spectroscopy, demonstrating that these bones were not freshly burned. Bayesian modeling of the radiocarbon dates indicates that stratum 4 accumulated during the first half of the 13th mill cal BP and that calcination occurred several hundred years later. We conclude that accumulation occurred naturally during the beginning of the Younger Dryas and that Epipalaeolithic visitors subsequently used the bones as fuel, starting from the mid-13th mill cal BP. At that time, dwarf hippos were probably already extinct or at least highly endangered. Our results shed new light on the possible causes of hippo extinction, on the subsequent introduction of the wild boar and on the earliest occupation of the island by humans.

Source:

Zazzo, A., Lebon, M., Quiles, A., Reiche, I. and Vigne, J-D. (2015). Direct Dating and Physico-Chemical Analyses Cast Doubts on the Coexistence of Humans and Dwarf Hippos in Cyprus. PLoS ONE 10(8): e0134429.

[surroundx]

Liakopoulou, D., van Heteren, A. H., Georgitsis, M. and Theodorou, G. (2017). Observations on the inner morphology of os petrosum of Phanourios minor with the use of micro CT, pp 114. In: Book of Abstracts of the 15th Congress of the RCMNS (Regional Committee on Mediterranean Neogene Stratigraphy), entitled “Exploring a “physical laboratory”: the Mediterranean Basin”, Crown Plaza Hotel, Athens, Greece, September 3-6, 2017.

[surroundx]

Nicolaou, Loucas et al. (In Press, 2020). Population dynamics on Aetokremnos hippos of Cyprus or have Cypriots ever tasted hippo meat? Quaternary International. doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2020.09.016 [Abstract]

[Sebbe]

Mitochondrial sequences of the extinct Cypriot pygmy hippopotamus confirm its phylogenetic placement.

The Cypriot pygmy hippopotamus is an extinct Mediterranean species that inhabited the island of Cyprus during the Late Pleistocene. This iconic species last appears at the archaeological site of Akrotiri Aetokremnos, dated to ~12 500 cal. BP. Taxonomically, the Cypriot pygmy hippopotamus has been assigned to Hippopotamus minor, which, based on morphology, is more closely related to the common hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius; today present only in Sub-Saharan Africa) than to the West African pygmy hippopotamus (Choeropsis liberiensis). Despite adverse conditions for preservation that greatly reduce the likelihood of DNA preservation in subfossil samples from hot environments, we recovered and analysed ancient DNA from petrous bones excavated from Akrotiri Aetokremnos. By whole mitogenome hybridization capture and exhaustive high-throughput sequencing, we were able to investigate the molecular phylogeny and taxonomic status of the Cypriot pygmy hippopotamus. The results of our low-coverage ancient mitogenomic analyses support the close phylogenetic affinity of H. minor to H. amphibius, with their divergence estimated at ~1.36 or 1.58 Mya, depending on the molecular dating method. To our knowledge, this study constitutes the first step towards reconstruction of the molecular phylogeny of Mediterranean Hippopotaminae.

academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlab089/6432118?redirectedFrom=fulltext

[Melanie]

Paleolithic Humans Caused Extinction of Dwarf Hippos and Elephants on Cyprus

www.sci.news/paleontology/paleolithic-humans-extinction-dwarf-hippos-elephants-cyprus-13273.html

Corey J.A. Bradshaw et al. 2024. Small populations of Palaeolithic humans in Cyprus hunted endemic megafauna to extinction. Proc. R. Soc. B 291 (2031): 20240967; doi: 10.1098/rspb.2024.0967

Abstract

The hypothesized main drivers of megafauna extinctions in the late Quaternary have wavered between over-exploitation by humans and environmental change, with recent investigations demonstrating more nuanced synergies between these drivers depending on taxon, spatial scale, and region. However, most studies still rely on comparing archaeologically based chronologies of timing of initial human arrival into naïve ecosystems and palaeontologically inferred dates of megafauna extinctions. Conclusions arising from comparing chronologies also depend on the reliability of dated evidence, dating uncertainties, and correcting for the low probability of preservation (Signor–Lipps effect). While some models have been developed to test the susceptibility of megafauna to theoretical offtake rates, none has explicitly linked human energetic needs, prey choice, and hunting efficiency to examine the plausibility of human-driven extinctions. Using the island of Cyprus in the terminal Pleistocene as an ideal test case because of its late human settlement (~14.2–13.2 ka), small area (~11 000 km2), and low megafauna diversity (2 species), we developed stochastic models of megafauna population dynamics, with offtake dictated by human energetic requirements, prey choice, and hunting-efficiency functions to test whether the human population at the end of the Pleistocene could have caused the extinction of dwarf hippopotamus (Phanourios minor) and dwarf elephants (Palaeoloxodon cypriotes). Our models reveal not only that the estimated human population sizes (n = 3000–7000) in Late Pleistocene Cyprus could have easily driven both species to extinction within < 1000 years, the model predictions match the observed, Signor–Lipps-corrected chronological sequence of megafauna extinctions inferred from the palaeontological record (P. minor at ~12–11.1 ka, followed by P. cypriotes at ~10.3–9.1 ka).

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2024.0967