BROADCASTS.com

Thanks to the Tracing Owls podcast for this week's suggestion. I'm a guest on that podcast so make sure to check it out (but while my episode is appropriate for younger listeners, most episodes are not, so be warned).\n\nFurther reading:\n\nHuge Hippos Roamed Britain One Million Years Ago\n\nKenyan fossils show evolution of hippos\nThe Kilopilopitsofy, Kidoky, and Bokyboky: Accounts of Strange Animals from Belo-sur-mer, Madagascar, and the Megafaunal \u201cExtinction Window\u201d\nA sort-of Malagasy hippo:\n\n\n\nActual hippo (not from Madagascar, By Muhammad Mahdi Karim - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=121282994):\n\n\n\nA modern hippo skull. There's a reason the hippo is more dangerous to humans than sharks are [By Raul654 - Darkened version of Image:Hippo skull.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=242785]:\n\n\n\nA pygmy hippo and its calf!\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\nThis week we\u2019re going to learn about a topic suggested by the host of the podcast Tracing Owls, because I\u2019m actually a guest on that podcast in an upcoming episode! I think the episode releases later this week. I\u2019ll put a link in the show notes, but be aware that while the podcast is interesting and often very funny, with topics that focus on weird stuff related to science, most episodes are not appropriate for younger listeners. (I think my episode should be okay.)\nSeveral years ago now there was a movie called Madagascar, which is about a group of zoo animals that end up shipwrecked on the island of Madagascar. I love this movie, especially the lemur King Julian, but one of my favorite characters is a hippopotamus named Gloria, voiced by Jada Pinkett Smith. The island country of Madagascar is off the southeastern coast of Africa, but as we talked about in episode 77, it\u2019s been separated from the continent of Africa for millions of years and the animals of that country have mostly evolved separately from the animals of Africa. That\u2019s part of why the movie Madagascar is so funny, since the main characters in the movie are all native to Africa\u2014a lion, a zebra, a giraffe, and Gloria the hippo\u2014and don\u2019t know anything about the animals they encounter on Madagascar. Like this guy:\n[King Julian clip]\nBut it turns out that hippos did once live on Madagascar, and that\u2019s what we\u2019re going to learn about today.\nWe\u2019re not sure when the first humans visited Madagascar, but it was at least 2500 years ago and possibly as much as 9500 years ago or even earlier. By 1500 years ago people were definitely living on the island. It\u2019s likely that hunting parties would travel to Madagascar and stay there for a while, then return home with lots of food, but eventually people decided it would be a nice place to live.\nMadagascar is a really big island, the fourth largest island in the world. It\u2019s been separated from every other landmass for around 88 million years, and has been separated from Africa for about 165 million years. Many of the animals and plants that live on Madagascar are very different from the ones living anywhere else in the world as a result.\nTo put this into perspective, here\u2019s your reminder that the closest living relative of the hippopotamus is the whale, and 60 million years ago the common ancestor of both hippos and whales was a small semi-aquatic animal. That was about 28 million years after Madagascar was on its own in the big wide ocean, and 105 million years after the landmass that we call Africa broke off from the supercontinent Gondwana and began moving very slowly into the position it\u2019s in today. When Madagascar finally broke free of the landmass we now call India, dinosaurs were still the dominant land animal.\nSo why are there remains of small hippos on Madagascar? How did the hippos get to Madagascar and why aren\u2019t they still around? Did the hippo originate in Africa or in some other place? So many questions!