Interesting Facts about Giraffes

Julius Caesar arranged to have a giraffe brought to Rome in 46 B.C. The Romans thought this strange-looking animal had a camel for a mother and a leopard for a father. Of course its parents were giraffes. Giraffes live only in Africa, south of the Sahara Desert. They are found in dry plains areas where they can travel about easily. It is impossible for them to walk in mud and they cannot swim. On the plains they move freely and can run at speeds of thirty miles an hour.
They usually travel in small herds consisting of a male and several females with their young. Baby giraffes are five and a half feet high at birth, They nurse for about nine months, after which time they are tall enough to reach and eat leaves of trees.
Giraffes are vegetarians. Their favorite food is leaves and branches of the acacia trees which are plentiful on the African plains. Giraffes get moisture from leaves and can go for several weeks without drinking water. If water is available, though, they will drink. In order to get their heads down to the water they have to spread their front legs wide apart. They are very vulnerable to attack by lions when they are in this position. Lions are the only animals other than men that will kill a giraffe.
Giraffes are the tallest of all the animals, the males often reaching a height of eighteen or nineteen feet. It would be possible for a man of average height to stand upright between a giraffe’s front legs. The neck of a giraffe may be five to six feet long; although there are no more vertebrae in it than in the neck of a cow-the vertebrae are just longer. The giraffe can extend its tongue out as far as eighteen inches from its mouth, which enables it to reach leaves of trees with ease. There are several kinds of giraffes. Each has a different colour pattern and a different number of small horns on their heads. The reticulated giraffe of eastern Africa, for example, has large brown spots separated by narrow white lines. The blotched giraffe has paler spots separated by larger whitish lines. They come from different sections of Africa, Deep in the Congo jungle lives a small relative of the giraffe, the okapi. This animal was unknown to scientists until the beginning of this century. It is much smaller than the giraffe and has a short neck. Its fur is almost brownish purple and there are white stripes on its legs.
Some fifteen million years ago giraffes which looked much like okapis lived in Asia as well as in Africa.