She Spent 46 Years Building The World's Largest Hippo Collection
In 1980, a friend gave Sheri Lynch a hippo stuffed animal for her birthday. She was hooked. Forty-six years later, Sheri's home in Gold Hill, Oregon, which she calls Hippo-Palooza, contains 1,086 unique hippopotamus-related items spanning stained-glass artwork, tiny plastic figurines, giant wooden carvings, hand-painted ceramics, hippo-themed kitchen items, and handmade accessories, earning her the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of hippopotamus-related items in the world, certified on July 30, 2025. The previous record stood at 604 items, held by Rebecca Fusco of Connecticut since 2016. Sheri nearly doubled it. She also has hippo tattoos on her arm, each one matching a specific piece in her collection. The hunt, she says, is the joy: the ongoing search for all these little treasures, which she finds at thrift stores, craft fairs, estate sales, and from friends who know by now what to bring her.
What makes Sheri's story particularly warm is where it sits in the larger arc of her life. For over 33 years she worked in public education, primarily in special education, and she is also an award-winning coordinator for her local little league team and a longtime volunteer at an animal rescue organization where she fostered kittens and rabbits. During the busiest years of all of that, her hippo collection went into storage while she directed her attention outward. In 2012 she brought it all back out and kept going. She told Guinness that after 46 years of collecting, she felt it was time to share the love of what she calls the world's river horse, and that why should she be the only one to receive happiness from this magnificent mammal. The certification process required approximately 200 hours of her time photographing and documenting each of the 1,086 items individually. Her husband, she notes with affection, is very patient. Guinness published the record earlier this month, and Sheri says her true pride and joy has always been raising her two sons, to whom she passed on her values of following your heart and giving back to the community. The hippos, she said, were just the most visible part of that.
