Natural selection propels the giraffe family to absolute extremes—and it is not just about the absurdly long necks
When paleontologist Jin Meng uncovered a strange skull in the vast, dry expanse of northern China’s Junggar Basin in 1996, he immediately had a hunch about the favorite activity of the ancient animal it came from. The skull was robust and heavily built, with a bony plate of nearly one-inch-thick bone around the area where the animal’s forehead would have been.
“When we talk about giraffes, people immediately think about the elongation of the neck,” Meng says. “But this species provides another example of extreme adaptation, showing that animals—even ones that are phylogenetically related—can evolve in totally different directions.” D. xiezhi was not that large, perhaps the size of a big sheep, but Meng and his colleagues found that the species’ head and neck were perhaps some of the strongest ever possessed by a mammal—and maybe any earlier creature, too. The researchers characterized D. xiezhi as having “the most complicated head-neck joints in mammals known to date.”
Fierce battles for females take place among modern male giraffes as well. But while D. xiezhi shares a family tree with Giraffa, modern giraffes are not direct descendants of the ancient species. Male giraffes use their neck in combat, not their head. Evolution of these elongated necks, the authors stated in the paper, might have been for fighting and not just to reach up to gain access to foliage. “Here, as in classical case studies, behavior may have strongly affected morphological evolution..
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