Largest warthog

The largest living species of warthog is the common warthog Phacochoerus africanus, native to much of sub-Saharan Africa, including Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria and South Africa. Adult males weigh up to 150 kg (females are as much as 15% lighter), and boast a head-and-body length of up to 1.5 m.

During much of the 20th century, zoologists had only recognized one living species of warthog, the common warthog. A century earlier than that, conversely, the warthogs of South Africa's Cape Province and the Orange Free State had been deemed by some to constitute a separate species, the Cape warthog, but this had died out by the end of the 1800s.

Following his studies on the few specimens preserved in museums, however, ungulate researcher Dr Peter Grubb disclosed in 1991 that a widely separated population of desert-dwelling warthogs still living in Somalia and northern Kenya belonged to this ostensibly "lost" second species, nowadays dubbed the desert warthog (as its Cape representatives are long-vanished), and that the latter was truly of discrete taxonomic status after all.