These 6 Animals Have the Biggest Butts in the World

Hippopotamus

Many butts of the animal kingdom outpace the size of a human’s — one such example is the hippopotamus. Hippos are massive mammals; they’re between nearly 11 and 17 feet long on average with a weight of up to 9,900 pounds for males and 3,000 for females.

With such size comes immense strength too. Couple that with aggressive, protective tendencies and it’s not surprising to find out that hippos cause over 500 deaths annually. It’s one of the largest, deadliest land mammals based on those actions alone.

“The hippopotamus has quite an expansive backside – spanning around five feet!” Said Dr. Sara Ochoa, agreeing with Dr. May. “This substantial caboose allows them to steer through rivers and also signifies stay out of my territory to rivals.”

While the hippo has a massive rear end, it also has an interesting rear end addition: Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi.

Don’t know what that animal is? You’re not alone — it’s an elusive species of leech that primarily prefers to live in the rectum flesh of hippos.

When Mark Siddall, the curator of invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History went to South Africa in 2003 to find one of these leeches in real life, a local game officer already had a hippo ready to go with dozens of leeches to take.

The leech has a monopoly of sorts on this uniquely-gross blood meal, meaning it has a massive advantage on other invertebrates in its habitat area. Instead of finding another host, these leeches have all the nutrients they need through hippos with little to no competition.

Baboon

You can’t discuss animal behinds and not mention a baboon. The red-rumped group of primates has several species with large butts, especially during mating season.

For baboons, the buttocks of females will swell and turn red to communicate ovulation windows. Recent research, however, found that the long-held belief of “bigger butt, better mother” in baboons seems to be false. The size of a female baboon’s derriere had no sway on how long babies live past infancy. It also didn’t attract more males — the only marked difference the researchers found was that males preferred to go for females who had more ovulation cycles since their last pregnancy.

Among all baboons and other Old World monkeys is the Celebes crested macaque (Macaca nigra), whose striking rear-end color becomes more obvious than many other species. This species rose to fame in the early 2010s when a member of the species took a “selfie” with a professional photographer’s equipment.

Size, however, isn’t impressive in the Celebes, as it’s one of the smaller members of the Old World Monkey family.

Giraffe

Not only do giraffes have big butts — they also use those butts for some weird uses. Giraffes don’t sleep much, but when they do, it’s a process to lay all their long limbs in a comfortable position. As such, they use their butt as a pillow on which to rest their heads. Their entire body contorts into a circle-esque lump of giraffe which only gets about 30 minutes of sleep in a full 24 hours on some days.

Giraffes also engage in a different meaning of the word “butt” — they butt heads to fight. Males will fight each other through these means, entering into a sort of neck-only wrestling match used to assert dominance within their cohort. The butting and clubbing of giraffe necks also help young males to develop their neck’s muscles and learn how to joust and win for future kerfuffles.

Rhinoceros

Smaller than a hippo but still a massive land animal is the rhino. Rhinos have large, thick-hided rear ends that produce a pretty interesting bowel movement when you dig deeper.

Adult white rhinos produce a large quantity of dung… as large as 50 pounds a day! Rhinos need to eat a ton of plants to get the nutrients to grow and survive, meaning what goes in must come out. Not only will a rhino produce a lot of dung; depending on its age and gender, the feces will have a different smell. Furthermore, females who can reproduce have a different dung smell than non-reproductive females.

Where do these big-butt, dung-heavy animals socialize with each other? Not a water cooler, of course, but the communal dung deposits known as middens actually serve as the “neighborhood hang out spot” where rhinos can meet with and catch up with other friendly crashes.

Okapi

The giraffe’s cousin — also known as the forest giraffe — makes the list of animals with the biggest butts because it’s not only in possession of a large rear end; it also has one of the most unique.

If you see an okapi from its behind alone, you may think it’s another animal entirely. Despite a solid-colored coat over its abdomen, neck, and head, the butt and legs of an okapi look like they were taken straight off of a zebra.

The okapi remains elusive in nature, as it resides in the deep forests of the Republic of the Congo and has well-developed hearing that can alert it to humans or predators several yards in the distance.

Blue Whale

Whales, like most fish, don’t have gluteal muscles. As such, they don’t really have a “butt” of which scientists can determine an accurate size. Still, the blue whale stands above the rest for a certain butt-related size record. Not only does the blue whale rank as the largest animal on earth that produces the largest babies — it also has the largest anus of any creature in the world.

It can open to a gigantic 20 centimeters wide, making way for some truly massive bowel movements. Memes floating online estimated the figure of over 40 centimeters wide, but researchers of ArsTechnica learned the truth from marine biologists: whalers and other researchers haven’t had a vested interest in whale anus size in some time, so that “40 centimeter” figure remains pure conjecture.

Through independent study, both Dr. Nick Pyenson and Dr. Matt Leslie found somewhere between 10 and 15 centimeters as the normal blue whale anus size, with 20 centimeters topping out as the absolute biggest one could be.