A Football-Sized Hippo Is Stealing the Spotlight in Kansas-A baby that looks like a shiny potato just made history. Meet Mars, the newborn pygmy hippo who officially made his debut at the Tanganyika Wildlife Park

Tanganyika Wildlife Park’s new baby pygmy hippo, Mars, made his public debut Tuesday afternoon.

Mars was born nearly a month ago to parents Posie and Pluto. Since then, he and Posie have been bonding behind the scenes, but now, it’s time for Mars to start learning how to swim.

“We need to make sure that he can swim and that he has that skill set,” Matt Fouts, the director at Tanganyika, said. “We do have a pool for them behind the scenes, but we can kind of control the volume of that and help him acclimate.”

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Mars weighed about 13 pounds at birth and is roughly the size of a watermelon. Pygmy hippos typically grow to around 400 pounds, about one-tenth the size of a grown hippo.

“He is not very big, and he is also incredibly slippery,” Fouts said. “We have tried to pick him up and weigh him, but you know he kind of has a slimy, like skin, and so he is hard to handle.”

Pygmy hippos are endangered, with fewer than 2,000 estimated to remain in the wild. Only one was born in the U.S. last year. Mars is now one of fewer than 450 pygmy hippos in human care worldwide.

This isn’t Posie’s first calf. She’s had four or five, and Fouts says things have gone well with each birth.

“All the other babies that were born here are at other facilities around the country, you know, there is not a lot. They are an endangered species, and so we are doing everything we can to make sure they have a variable population here and are managed and cared, and have diverse genetics,” he said. “We wanna get them paired up with other different animals with different origins, so different genetics.”

Fouts added that placing pygmy hippos in different zoos helps raise awareness for the species.

“When they are at other facilities, that’s an opportunity to help everything that they are raising awareness about that species and just help people fall in love with that typical species or just any species in general,” he said.

Tanganyika is encouraging guests to come meet Mars and maybe fall in love with him, too.

“We want people to come check him out, obviously he is super cute, I know he has been a little bit around on USA Today, he is not quite Modane, but we think he is just as cute and we want people to come see him,” Fouts said.