These days, the humble hippo is found exclusively in sub-Saharan Africa, but that hasn’t always been the case – thousands of years ago, the river horse also inhabited central Europe, for far longer than we once thought. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

During the Middle and Late Pleistocene, some 780,000 to 12,000 years ago, Europe’s climate oscillated between periods of freezing temperatures and warmer interludes, which allowed hippopotamuses to migrate out of Africa in multiple waves. At their peak geographic distribution, hippos ranged from the British Isles in the northwest to the Iberian and Italian peninsulas in the south.

It was previously assumed that the surprisingly airborne mammals went extinct in Central

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