Archaeologists have made a "significant discovery" of ancient pygmy hippo fossils on an island in Greece.
The preserved remains, which date back to 350,000 B.C., were discovered on Crete, by paleontologists from the University of Athens, Greece, news agency AFP reported.
The discovery was made last week at Katharo Plateau on the Dikti mountain to the east of the popular holiday island. It marks the first time such a "high concentration of pygmy hippopotamus fossils" has been found in Greece. Paleontologist Giorgos Lyras, who worked on the excavation, told AFP that it was a "significant discovery."
The pygmy hippopotamus, or pygmy hippo, is a small member of the hippopotamid family. Nowadays, the animals are native to West Africa, living in swamps and forests.
Katharo Plateau lies at an elevation some 3,600 feet above sea level. Fossils are often discovered in such high places, where centuries of soil and sediment cover the bones and eventually bury them.
The excavations are set to continue through to the weekend, AFP reported, and will also take place from September. "We expect to find an even greater number of hippopotamus fossils," Lyras told the news agency.
Other animals have been unearthed on Crete and the other Greek islands. Dwarf elephants were found to have lived in the Aegean islands, including Naxos and Rhodes. Fossils like these can inform researchers about the ecosystems existing thousands of years ago.
The ancient pygmy hippo fossils and dwarf elephants of Greece are not the only discoveries to be made in Europe recently.
Earlier this month, in Bari, a port city in southern Italy, a retired geologist stumbled across some dinosaur footprints that dated back to 100 million years ago. The footprints were embedded into a rock formation near the coast, local news outlet Barinedita reported.
The five fossilized footprints belonged to an ankylosaurus, dating back to the very end of the Cretaceous period, about 68 to 66 million years ago. The ankylosaurus was a large herbivorous dinosaur, between 20 and 26 feet long, and had a bulky build and short, strong limbs. The footprints are all within walking distance of each other.
Ankylosauruses also had large shell-like armor on their backs, made up of small and large bony plates. The dinosaurs boasted a large club at the tip of their tails.
"The seabed at the time was shallow. Here, they came to look for food, so they left their footprints also due to the fragility of these expanses of debris. This is why today we find the footprints, but we don't see the skeletons of these dinosaurs," the geologist Vincenzo Colonna told Il Quotidiano Italiano in Bari, Italy.
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