Winning by a neck -- Giraffes avoid competing with shorter browsers

The giraffe's elongated neck has long been used in textbooks as an illustration of evolution by natural selection, but this common example has received very little experimental attention. In the January issue of the American Naturalist, researchers at the Mammal Research Institute in the Department...

Climate-caused biodiversity booms and busts in ancient plants and mammals

...useum of Nature & Science. Some 30 new rodents, carnivores, primates and artiodactyls (the group that includes sheep, goats, camels, pigs, cows, deer, giraffes and antelopes, among others) appeared on the scene. But then, as temperatures declined again, the number of mammal genera dropped to a low of 84, ...

100 reasons to change the way we think about genetics

...lightly longera trait that was passed on to descendants. Generation after generation inherited slightly longer necks, and the result is what we see in giraffes today. With the advent of Mendelian genetics and the later discovery of DNA, Lamarck's ideas fell out of favor entirely. Research on epigenetics, w...

Fossil evidence of missing link in the origin of seals, sea lions, walruses found in Canadian Arctic

...hwater fishes, one bird, and four mammalian taxa: shrew, rabbit, rhinoceros, and small artiodactyl (small short-legged herbivores, ancestors to modern giraffes and deer). The earliest well-represented pinniped, Enaliarctos a marine form with flippershas been found on northern Pacific shores of North Ame...

Scientists find fossil proof of Egypt's ancient climate

...ng picture of arid Egypt: 130,000 years ago, what everyone considers an eternal desert was actually a thriving savannah, complete with humans, rhinos, giraffes and other wild life. Evidence for the hominin presence abounds near the lake in the form of Middle Stone Age artifacts such as stone scrapers and b...

Giraffes in Biological Definition

Species

...Lamarck suggested that an organism could pass on an acquired trait to its offspring, i.e., the giraffe 's long neck was attributed to generations of giraffes stretching to reach the leaves of higher treetops (this well-known and simplistic example, however, does not do justice to the breadth and subtlety of...