An account from a later historian, Benedetto Bordone published in 1528, reporting on a similar deposit in the Kyrenia mountains, recounted that locals ground the bones into powder to make a potion they thought could cure many diseases.

[2] The earliest scientific description of the species was given by French paleontologist Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest in 1822, who gave the current name Hippopotamus minor.

[7] Due to Cyprus never having been connected to the mainland, its ancestors must have arrived via crossing the Mediterranean, perhaps as the result of a rare cataclysmic flooding event.

[11] Compared to H. amphibius, the muzzle region of the skull is much shorter, resmbling the condition found in the African pygmy hippopotamus.

[8] Unlike other species of the genus Hippopotamus, the upper fourth premolar has been lost, possibly as a result of the skull shortening.

[2] During the Late Pleistocene, the Cypriot pygmy hippopotamus, along with the similarly sized Cyprus dwarf elephant, were the only large mammals native to the islands, and one of only four native terrestrial mammal species, alongside the still living Cypriot mouse and the extinct genet species Genetta plesictoides,[14] and had no natural predators.

[16] Over 200,000 bones of H. minor, representing over 500 individuals, are associated with human artifacts at the Aetokremnos rockshelter on the southern coast of Cyprus, dating to approximately 13-12,000 years Before Present, representing among the youngest records of the species, which is suggested by some authors to provide evidence that the Cypriot pygmy hippopotamus was hunted and driven to extinction by the early human residents of Cyprus.