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Giraffe
The tallest animal on earth — a patchwork coat, a two-metre neck, and a long dark tongue built to strip thorny treetops.
How to spot it
Unmistakable — the tallest living animal, up to five or six metres, with an enormously long neck and legs, a coat of brown patches on cream, and short skin-covered horns called ossicones. Its tongue is dark, almost purple, and up to half a metre long.
Where it lives
The savannas and open woodlands of sub-Saharan Africa, where its height lets it browse leaves nothing else can reach. Herds are loose and shifting rather than tightly bonded.
What it eats
A browser that feeds mainly on acacia leaves and shoots high in the trees, using its long prehensile tongue and tough lips to strip foliage past the thorns. It draws most of its water from leaves and can go a long time without drinking.
Behaviour & life
Despite that neck, a giraffe has the same seven neck bones as a human. It sleeps very little, gives birth standing (the calf drops nearly two metres to the ground), and males "neck" — swinging their heads at one another — to settle dominance.
Conservation
Classed as Vulnerable, with numbers falling across much of Africa through habitat loss and poaching — a decline quiet enough to be called a "silent extinction". In India you will see giraffes only in the larger zoos.
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