/ Source: Live Science
The first hippos may have been about the size of overgrown sheep.
Fossils from an ancient ancestor to hippos, part of a family of creatures known as anthrocotheres, have been unearthed in a rock bed in Kenya. The new finds suggest the ancient water-babies weighed just a few hundred pounds and looked like shrunken versions of the portly mammals found in Africa today.
"They are slender hippos, very thin hippos," said study co-author Fabrice Lihoreau, a paleontologist at the University of Montpellier in France.