The Golden Estuary Hippopotamus [H. aestuariumi] was hunted to extinction by the late 19th Century. These teeth in the Museum's collection were discovered on the Thames Foreshore over several years by Mudlarkers. While the trade in Hippo Gold has been regulated in Britain since antiquity, with strong capital penalties for smuggling, "crown-molars" of the kind presented here are unlikely to have been part of the black market trade. Instead, carbon testing reveals that they are in fact fossils, some 25 million years old, thus disproving McIlster {et al, 1965} who argued that hippos had occupied the Thames only since the last ice age.
