Malagasy Hippopotamus - Oral Legends and The Kilopilopitsofy

Oral Legends and The Kilopilopitsofy

Although no fossil evidence has been dated within the last 1,000 years, the hippopotamus has been surprisingly common in the oral legends of the Malagasy. In 1648, Étienne de Flacourt became the French governor of Madagascar and he wrote in his Histoire de la grande isle de Madagascar about hearing stories from the Malagasy about an animal called the mangarsahoc which closely resembled the hippopotamus. In different regions of Madagascar, stories were recorded of the tsy-aomby-aomby, the omby-rano, and the laloumena, all animals that resembled hippopotami, but few other animals on the island. In 1902, a colonial administrator named Raybaud asserted that stories he heard in the highlands could only be about Malagasy hippos still living as late as 1878. The strength of these oral traditions led the IUCN to classify the Malagasy hippopotami as recent extinctions.

In the 1990s, Burney, who was studying recent extinctions in Madagascar, collected tales about a creature called the kilopilopitsofy that had been described by villages in the town of Belo-sur-mer, a small fishing village on the west coast. Several villagers independently described an animal that, as recently as 1976 had entered their village, was the size of a cow, was dark pigmented, grunted a lot, and when threatened, fled underwater. No known animal on Madagascar fits the description but the animal seemed remarkably like a hippopotamus.

One man in the village could accurately mimic the sound of many animals, and when asked to imitate the kilopilopitsofy, he made noises very similar to that of a hippopotamus, even though he had never left the island and said he had never seen an African hippo. When shown photos, others also identified a hippopotamus-like animal, but with larger ears. Several described the creature's last appearance in 1976.

Burney was reluctant to publish the study for fear of being labeled a cryptozoologist, but eventually published the results in American Anthropologist. Burney concluded that while the villagers had possibly encountered a Malagasy hippopotamus, it was also possible that the stories were inaccurate—a combination of misidentified animals, old folk traditions, and information the villagers had gathered from modern paleontology.