Snout first, Gloria the baby hippo took her first tentative steps into the deep pool in her enclosure at France's Beauval zoo on Monday.

Born on June 7, the baby had already swum in a smaller interior tank, where her mother Bolinhas helped her rise to the surface to breathe, but Monday's outing was the first in the main enclosure with its two-metre deep pool, which is to be her new home.

Gloria, named after the hippo in the DreamWorks movie Madagascar, weighed 38 kilograms when she was born after an eight month pregnancy, her mother's first, and became the only baby hippopotamus in France, according to the zoo.

For the moment she has been kept away from her father Kvido, and has spent the first two weeks inside.

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