How long are giraffes legs

Females cows can grow to be 15 feet tall and weigh 1, pounds. At birth, a baby giraffe calf is about 6 feet tall and weighs pounds.

A standing group of giraffes is called a tower. A moving group of giraffes is called a journey. The tongue is also prehensile , meaning the animal can use its strong, muscular tongue to grasp and manipulate objects. Thus, giraffes can use their tongues to adeptly remove leaves and shoots from even the thorniest of plants. Giraffes have ossicones often mistakenly called horns made up of cartilage and covered in skin or fur. A giraffe heart can measure up to 2 feet long , weighs about Their blood pressure is twice that of a human.

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SEB Manchester Image source, Christopher Basu. The researchers hope to understand how the animals evolved to be so "bizarrely long-necked". Giraffes can support their bodyweight while not engaging too much muscle. The easy solution is to chew the bones from carcasses to make their own bones stronger, a behaviour known as osteophagy. Giraffes occasionally sit or lie down, but not for long.

They do most things standing up, including sleeping, mating and giving birth. After a gestation lasting around days, one of the longest of any hoofed animal, a female giraffe drops her calf — literally. The kg baby falls around 2m to the ground, snapping its umbilical cord.

Amazingly, the infant is unharmed and will be on its legs and suckling within the hour. It stands over 1. A baby giraffe is called a calf and incredibly it has the ability to stand, with the odd wobble, soon after being born. It is thought the long gestation period of a giraffe — 15 months — helps the calf become more developed so it can stand and walk at a very early age. Other adaptations to prevent sudden giraffe collapse are valves to stop the back-flow of blood and elastic-walled vessels that dilate and constrict to manage flow.

NASA has even done research on the blood vessels in giraffe legs to get inspiration for human space suits. But if the results of the study above lead to the total giraffe population being split between four species, the adjustment could lead to one or more of them being classified as species under threat.

The natural habitat for giraffes used to be distributed throughout North and West Africa, including the Sahara, and along the Nile. However, today giraffes are only found in sub-Sarahan Africa. Surprisingly enough for an African species, the giraffe originated from Eurasia, probably temperate Eurasia. This genus evolved seven to eight million years ago. The giraffe genus Giraffa is part of the Giraffidae family, which contains only one other species: the rare okapi, the closest relative of the giraffe.

This forest-dweller has a shorter neck, just like the extinct species from which both it and giraffes are thought to have evolved. Okapi are the only living relative of the giraffe. Both are in the Giraffidae family, with girafffes in the Giraffa genus and okapi in the Okapia genus. Giraffidae are ruminants, and share a common ancestor with deer and bovids. On first sight, the two Giraffidae look quite different but do share a number of similar features, including a long, dark-coloured tongue.

In the okapi, the tongue can measure between 14 and 18 inches long and they can lick their own ears and eyelids. Read our guide to okapi and learn more about the species.