Armley Hippo information

Armley Hippo

Displayed at Leeds City Museum
Common name	Armley Hippo
Species	Hippopotamus
Age	130,000 to 117,000 years (Ipswichian interglacial period)[1]
Place discovered	Armley, England, United Kingdom
Date discovered	1851–1852
Discovered by	Brick pit workmen

The Armley Hippo, previously known as the Leeds Hippopotamus, is a partial skeleton of a common hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) consisting of 122 bones, of which 25 were taxidermy-mounted in 2008 by James Dickinson for display at Leeds City Museum in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. The skeleton dates to the last interglacial (Eemian) around 130,000 to 115,000 years ago.

The bones were discovered between 1851 and 1852 by workmen digging clay at Longley's brickfield in Wortley, Leeds (now Armley). Astonished at the size of the remains, they brought the larger bones to Henry Denny, the curator at the Leeds Philosophical Society's former museum in Park Row, Leeds. Denny visited the brickfield and retrieved many more bones, although some of the smaller bones had been lost. The remains discovered at the site in 1851 included parts of four hippopotami (including the Armley Hippo), a woolly mammoth and an aurochs. In 1852, the bones of two more hippopotami were found there.

The discovery impressed the antiquarians of the Victorian era, because it was rare to find remains of the hippopotamus so far north in the world, and because Leeds Museum was "probably now in possession of the most extensive series of hippopotamic remains of any provincial museum in the kingdom". It has been suggested that, at a time when the climate was warmer and some of the continents that are now separate were joined together, the Armley Hippo or its ancestors may have travelled north along watercourses from Africa to the land that is now England, and that early humans may have co-existed with some of the hippopotami found in Yorkshire.

The Armley Hippo skeleton has long captured the public imagination. It has been on display, first as a pile of bones, and then as a mount, in various museum locations in Leeds since it was discovered. In the 19th century, it was the subject of lectures and papers and is still sometimes the subject of newspaper articles. Today it is often used as an educational tool. "For generations it’s been the city’s most famous prehistoric peculiarity".