Where to Find Hippos at the North Pole

 SPOILERS: The answer's underground, and in bits, because fifty million years or so ago the Arctic was a swamp! Did elephants have antlers back then, as imagined in this engraving? Who knows? I mean, absolutely not, according to the fossil record, but unweildy tusks and supernumerary knobbly bits were abundant in the methane-rich Eocene. Also, more recent, scientifically verifiable visualisations of the epoch show a planet ruled by giant parrots, so let's not rule anything out.

 I couldn't find any attribution for the engraving, but it looks as if it might come from a children's book published in 1887 by Henry Davenport Northrop, called Earth, Sea, and the Sky (I wonder if Ursula K. Le Guin had a copy). Illustrations from it are all over the internet, and well worth seeking out. Here, for example, is a Megalosaurus where they sort of get the head right...

 Speaking of windows on the world, the reason I know the Arctic used to be a swamp is because it's one of the many things I learnt playing around with PBS' Nova Polar Lab, as recommended by Sarah Airress after her own trip to McMurdo in Antarctica. The brilliantly engaging, slightly glitchy interactive website takes you round the globe, to visit actual field scientists in their often extraordinary research stations – like David Holland's here, on the Jakobshavn Glacier, which sank the Titanic –

– and then dig up fossils, bore down miles into ice sheets, or send seals out to measure the water temperature, to learn, first hand, the history of this planet, and the stark reality of the sharp change in its climate. You can find it HERE. I really recommend it. It is probably for children.

 

You get to visit McMurdo too.