“A creature even mightier than the crocodile,” Pliny called the hippo, and right he was. But he was talking about the massive and always impressive full-sized hippo. Today’s Endangered All-Star is an altogether daintier and sadly more endangered animal. Perhaps 3,000 survive in the wild, their forests increasingly logged and converted to agriculture. The few countries where they still occur, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, and Guinea, have suffered through civil wars and political instability, as damaging for wildlife as for the human population. May the Pygmy Hippo not follow its closely related subspecies—in Madagascar and Nigeria—into extinction.
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