Question: why have giraffes got long necks?

Juan Carlos Lopez-Baez answered on 8 Mar 2014:

Hello Evie and Lily

That is a great question and I am glad you asked because the length of a giraffe’s neck is one of the best examples of evolution in the animal world.

See, evolution is when animals adapt to their environment in a way that it lets them survive better in it. This can be anything, from being able to run faster than other animals and so be better at escaping predators; to growing a different colour of fur that would allow them to go unnoticed in certain environments.

In the case of the giraffes, scientists believe that they developed such long necks because their length allowed them to reach the highest areas of a tree that other animals couldn’t reach. This meant that they never had to fight with other animals to eat a tree’s tasty leaves (well, tasty if you are a giraffe!).

Of course, they didn’t grow their necks in a day; evolution is a process that happens over thousands of years and it only happens if the change (which normally happens by chance!) is beneficial for the animal. Think this, at one point there were giraffes with long necks and giraffes with short necks, but the giraffes with longer necks were able to survive because they were able to eat more food, have more energy and be stronger than the ones with shorter necks.

Additionally, scientists have also discovered that giraffes can use their enormous height to look out for danger. This probably also helped with their survival, as it meant that they could spot a predator from a long distance away.

As a fun-fact, did you know that we have the same amount of vertebrae (the bones that make our necks and backbones) as giraffes? Theirs are just much longer than ours 🙂

PS: This video might also help to understand it better http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/why-does-the-giraffe-have-a-long-neck/6244.html