Charles Darwin assumed the driver of the giraffe’s long neck was food, but a newly analyzed fossil of an ancient giraffe relative suggests there might be more to the story.
How did the giraffe get its long neck? That question has enthralled scientists for centuries. Charles Darwin assumed the driver of natural selection was food, as animals with longer necks could reach higher trees and have their own private food supply with little competition from other species. But a newly analyzed fossil of an ancient giraffe relative suggests there might be more to the story: Competition for mates could have also influenced neck evolution.
“It’s a cool story about an amazing sexual weapon,” says Ted Stankowich an evolutionary ecologist at California State University, Long Beach, who was not involved with the work. In 1996, in a 15-million-year-old rock formation in China’s far northwest, paleontologists unearthed an unusual fossil with a braincase and some vertebrae. Its skull was thickened at the base, where it had been attached to an enlarged neck vertebra.
Deng and a CAS colleague, paleontologist Shi-Qi Wang, did a CT scan to examine how its bones were formed and arranged. In addition to the unusually thick bones of the neck, they found a hand-size bony disk with a horny “helmet” on the top of its head. They analyzed how the vertebrae interlocked and did computer simulations to learn how the head and neck would react to impacts. They even probed the chemistry of the creature’s tooth enamel to find out what it ate.
Deng and Wang then compared the data with those on other giraffoids and animals, including wild sheep and musk ox, which lock horns or butt heads to compete for mates. The fossil’s vertebrae were not just thicker than those of other animals, but they also had more surface area in contact with the base of the skull and each other. “It’s the thickness of the vertebrae that makes [the fossil] very unusual,” says Jin Meng, a co-author at the American Museum of Natural History.
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