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  • RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

Hippos still roamed Europe during the last ice age

DNA found in fossils from southwestern Germany suggests the populations survived in the region much longer than expected.
Left lower jaw fragment of a female hippopotamus on a white background

The left mandible of a female hippopotamus that lived in the Upper Rhine Plain around 47,000 years ago. Credit: Rebecca Kind/Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen

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Between 780,000 and 12,000 years ago, Europe’s climate swung between freezing stretches and warmer periods that allowed hippopotamuses to migrate out of Africa into Europe, where they thrived as far north as Britain. Scientists have long thought that hippos disappeared from Central Europe by about 115,000 years ago, with the onset of the last ice age — but analyses of fossils from Germany now tell a different story1.

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Nature 646, 519 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03270-7

References

  1. Arnold, P. et al. Curr. Biol. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.09.035 (2025).

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