Food… or Sex?
“The neck of a giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) is a marvelous thing. Comprised of only seven vertebrae – no more than in your neck – the towering feat of natural engineering is at once stunning and ridiculous. How could such a structure have evolved? This question is not just a throw-away. For the past century and a half, naturalists have been vexed by the long neck of the giraffe. Darwin… proposed that there were individuals among an ancestral population of giraffes which just happened to have slightly longer necks than their fellows. This allowed them to reach higher branches, and as a consequence these giraffes were more reproductively successful since they persisted on an untouched food source.”
However, there is a another, racier hypothesis out there – sex.
“Male giraffes often swing their necks to batter each other with their stout ossicones… The competition between males, which appeared to have longer and stronger necks, had driven the evolution of the giraffe neck. Female giraffes were somehow carried along as sexual selection among males kept pushing the limits of neck length.”
Read more at Wired.
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