The Plush Hippo and The Hippo's Closest Living Relative

The Plush Hippo and The Hippo's Closest Living Relative

If you are at all familiar with stuffed animals, you know that the plush hippo ranks high on the adorable scale. With its roly poly and oh, so squishable body, the plush hippo is a must have soft toy for anyone fond of these loveable creatures.

The closest living relative to the hippo is under dispute. Research that was published in 2007, states that hippos are most closely related to living pigs. But, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary, Canada, Jessica Theodor, says their closest living relative is the whale; the 2007 published research also says whales are linked to a pig-like animal that is extinct.

So whose right? According to Theodor, the published article by J. G. M. Thewissen, a professor at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, and his colleagues, is inaccurate. While she agrees that the closest relative to the whale is Indohyus (a small mammal that lived in Asia 48 million years ago), she says where they are wrong is that they believe hippos are more closely related to true pigs than to whales; "this contradicts most of the data from DNA from the last 12 or 13 years. Those data place hippos as the closest living relative to whales."

Per Theodor, in the research conducted by Thewissen, no DNA evidence was used at all in determining the ancestor results.. Instead, with only the use of fossil evidence, a family tree was created with which the conclusion was made that hippos and pigs have more in common than they do with whales.

In the research community, biologists typically rely on the shape of bones when studying family trees of animals. This is precisely what Thewissen and his group did after the discovery of the new fossil (by the same group of people) of the extinct mammal Indohyus. With the revolution of DNA today, scientists have the ability to use [DNA] data to help them reconstruct family trees. Per Theodor, "in order to get the best understanding, researchers combine the two sources of data in a single analysis. But what Thewissen and his group did, was leave one of the major ones out." Unfortunately, the use of DNA is not always an option given most fossils can't provide it.

Before DNA was ever used as it is now, it was believed that hippos were closely related to pigs, but DNA has shown that it's whales that are the ones most related [to hippos]. By leaving out DNA data in the study, Thewissen is not only ignoring important information, but is also implying that the evolution of swimming happened independently in hippos and whales, when in fact, it may have only evolved a single time in what would have been a common ancestor.

In the scheme of things, when it comes to the plush hippo, it doesn't make any difference to the soft toy who the animal is most closely related to. [Plush] pigs are equally as adorable as plush hippos and surely, a drop or two of cuteness can be found in a whale stuffed toy too.

plush hippo

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Copyright Shelley Vassall, 2010. Contact the author to obtain permission for republication.

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