Finally, 2014 brought us a Pygmy Hippopotamus (actually, it's even two of them) by a major brand!
So here are the new CollectA
Wild Life Pygmy Hippopotamus (88686) & Calf (88687), Choeropsis (syn.: Hexaprotodon) liberiensis (Morton, 1849). While I haven't measured the calf (which would represent a very young one that should probably be a good deal smaller to be in scale with the adult, but that's often the case with adults and calves by the same manufacturer), the adult has a snout-vent length of 101 mm, a shoulder height of 47, and a total height of 51 mm, so the scale is approx. 1:16 - 1:17. The last photo gives a size comparison with the huge Safari Ltd Wildlife Wonders Hippopotamus which is about the same scale (1:15 - 1:17).
Not only more terrestrial and much smaller than its larger cousin, the Pygmy Hippopotamus is also much rarer, restricted to a few Western African countries (Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d'Ivoire, with a population or subspecies in Nigeria already being extinct). With a total population of probably less than 3,000 individuals remaining, IUCN classifies the species as "
Endangered".
Edit 2017-02-05: Fixed broken image urls.
