Hippos are terrifying. I feel like everyone expects elephants and rhinos to be big and intimidating, but hippos sometimes feel too big, to the point where, if you’re standing on a narrow bridge over a river, and a hippo surfaces under you, it can be genuinely disorienting, and you have to take your brain aside to explain why a whole-ass nuclear submarine just surfaced out of that brown puddle. They also make noises that are… big. They sound like a giant laughing.

I’ll admit, though, that while I’ve seen them in the wild, and even got a plaster cast of a footprint (It’s still at my parents’ place back in the US), I don’t actually know a whole lot about them. Fortunately, Ze Frank is here to educate us, and tell us more than we ever wanted to know about hippos and their poop. One of the facts I didn’t know before, was that they’re actually more closely related to dolphins and whales than to rhinos and elephants. Their common ancestor apparently decided that running around on river bottoms and grazing on land was a better deal than going full aquatic. As always, these videos are not for children or adults who don’t think like children.