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Hippopotamus creutzburgi is an extinct species of
hippopotamusHippopotamuses are the members of the family Hippopotamidae. They are the only extant artiodactyls which walk on four toes on each foot.- Characteristics :...
which lived on the island of
CreteCrete is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, and one of the thirteen administrative regions of Greece. It forms a significant part of the economy and cultural heritage of Greece while retaining its own local cultural traits...
.
Hippopopotamus colonized Crete probably 800,000 years ago and lived there during the Middle
PleistoceneThe Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....
.
Two
subspeciesSubspecies in biological classification, is either a taxonomic rank subordinate to species, ora taxonomic unit in that rank . A subspecies cannot be recognized in isolation: a species will either be recognized as having no subspecies at all or two or more, never just one...
have been named:
Hippopotamus creutzburgi creutzburgi and the smaller
Hippopotamus creutzburgi parvus.
Bones of the
H. creutzburgi were found by
Dorothea BateDorothea Minola Alice Bate FGS , also known as Dorothy Bate, was a British palaeontologist, a pioneer of archaeozoology...
on the
Katharo plateauKatharo is a plateau on the Dikti mountain on the island of Crete, in the prefecture of Lassithi. Administratively it belongs to the municipality of Aghios Nikolaos, . It is from Kritsa and from Mesa Lassithi . It is long, wide and at an average altitude of above sea level,...
, in eastern Crete, in the 1920s.
A similar species, the
Cyprus Dwarf HippopotamusThe Cyprus Dwarf Hippopotamus or Cypriot Pygmy Hippopotamus is an extinct species of hippopotamus that inhabited the island of Cyprus until the early Holocene....
(
Hippopotamus minor) lived on the island of
CyprusCyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...
until the
HoloceneThe Holocene is a geological epoch which began at the end of the Pleistocene and continues to the present. The Holocene is part of the Quaternary period. Its name comes from the Greek words and , meaning "entirely recent"...
. It was smaller than both species of Cretan hippo.