Edgar Williams - Giraffe

The giraffe is instantly recognizable, with its tall neck, strange angular head, long knobbly legs, golden-brown mottled coat and long, swishing tail. Everything about a giraffe is big or unusual and consequently the giraffe has fascinated man throughout its history, with its quiet and lofty stance representing in the human psyche virtue, peace and harmony.

Many thousands of years ago, the giraffe and its ancestors were common throughout the whole of Africa, Southern Europe and India. Sadly, this is no longer so and now it is found only in Africa. The giraffe and its close relative the okapi are now the only living representatives of the Giraffidae family.

The giraffe, once common throughout Africa, has seen its range continuously shrink. In the past eight hundred years or so the Northern giraffe has disappeared from North Africa as creeping desertification removed the necessary vegetation. Even today, the giraffes range is continually threatened. The western populations (Western or Nigerian giraffe) are most acutely affected, with only a few hundred individuals now remaining in the wild. The only substantial populations left are in east and southern Africa, protected in the many national parks.

The origin of the modern giraffe is unclear, as the fossil history of the Giraffidae is incomplete. This lack of a clear ancestral path allows for vigorous scientific and philosophical debate and continues to engender controversial literary sparring between evolutionists and non-evolutionists, such as the advocates of intelligent design and creationism. The reason for this controversy is that the known fossil record does not explain how the giraffe got its long neck. All the fossil ancestors discovered so far have relatively short necks, like the giraffes only extant cousin, the okapi, so how, where and when did the neck suddenly elongate or evolve? Or was it formed by some as yet undiscovered mechanism unexplained by the theory of evolution?

The giraffe is a two or even-toed ruminant and shares some common ancestry and therefore physiology with cows (Bovidae), deers (Cervidae) and camels (Camelus). The so-called Giraffidae family tree starts some 25 million years ago with an antelopetype animal called the Teruelia, named after the location in which the fossils were found, the Teruel Basin in Spain. This evidence came from an archaeological dig in the 1930s in Kish, Iraq, where a copper rein ring from a chariot dated to 3500 BC was uncovered. Mounted on this ring is what looks like at first sight a stag tethered by a rope, but what is unusual is that the animal has two horns above the eyes, and on close examination looks more like the Sivatherium than any known species of deer. If still alive today it might have been further domesticated, like its relative the cow.

It is the Canthumerycids that gave rise to the present day giraffe and okapi. Early fossils (twenty million years old) found in Africa, such as Canthumeryx sirtense, show a small antelopelike creature. Next, the Giraffokeryx (sixteen million years ago) appeared, which had distinct ossicones and a giraffine skull of around fifty centimetres in length. Eventually the Asian, Indian and European Giraffidae became extinct (about four million years ago) and only the African giraffes were left.

The final African lineage contained five species. Three were small and two large, the Giraffa jumae and Giraffa camelo pardalis; the latter is the giraffe we all know today. Fossils of Giraffa camelopardalis, the modern giraffe with its long neck, appear in East Africa from one million years ago onwards. Why all these different species (over thirty) all disappeared we can only conjecture, as many other ruminant species like the deer and antelope grew and spread worldwide. It may be that a peculiar and as yet unidentified pressure led to the modern giraffe having to become the specialist browser of today in order to survive.