Natural history miscellany winning by a neck: Tall giraffes avoid competing with shorter browsers
With their vertically elongated body form, giraffes generally feed above the level of other browsers within the savanna browsing guild, despite having access to foliage at lower levels. They ingest more leaf mass per bite when foraging high in the tree, perhaps because smaller, more selective browsers deplete shoots at lower levels or because trees […]
The giraffe’s neck: another icon of evolution falls
The giraffe is a major problem for Darwinism for many reasons. No evidence exists in the fossil record for giraffe evolution, nor are evolutionists able to explain why the giraffe’s neck evolved. The most common Darwinian explanation for giraffe neck evolution—the advantage a long neck gave in reaching leaves high in trees for food—is now […]
The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis L.) – What Do We Really Know? (Part 2)
Introduction: The story which is commonly taught in high schools about the evolution of the long-necked giraffe by natural selection (feeding-competition-hypothesis) fails to explain, among other things, the size differences between males and females. Giraffe cows are up to 1.5 meters shorter than the giraffe bulls, not to mention the offspring. The wide migration range […]
The evolution of the long-necked giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis L.) – What do we really know? (Part 1)
In the following article the assertions of three supporters of the synthetic theory concerning the evolution of the long-necked giraffe will be discussed: the statements of Ulrich Kutschera, Richard Dawkins and Kathleen Hunt. Ulrich Kutschera made the following statement regarding the origin of the giraffe, on 29 November 2005 in 3SAT (a German TV channel): […]
Seeing spots: quantifying mother-offspring similarity and assessing fitness consequences of coat pattern traits in a wild population of giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis)
Polymorphic phenotypes of mammalian coat coloration have been important to the study of genetics and evolution, but less is known about the inheritance and fitness consequences of individual variation in complex coat pattern traits such as spots and stripes. Giraffe coat markings are highly complex and variable and it has been hypothesized that variation in […]