Giraffes Visit Family For Breakfast

Giraffes have been used as examples for introducing ideas in evolution, especially to illustrate the ideas of Lamarck. Lamarck believed that the giraffe's long neck developed as a result of ancestral giraffe's reaching to browse on the leaves of tall trees. In addition the coat patterns of several subspecies of giraffe have been modelled using reaction-diffusion mechanisms. The giraffe's circulatory system has been studied by NASA which hopes to replicate the giraffe's ability to keep blood from pooling in its lower body for astronauts returning from space.
Conservation
Overall, the giraffe is regarded as Least Concern from a conservation perspective by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), as it still is widespread and occurs in numerous reserves. However, the giraffe has been extirpated from many parts of its former range, including Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Guinea, Malawi, Mauritania and Senegal. It may also have disappeared from Angola, Mali and Nigeria. Two subspecies, the West African Giraffe (G. c. peralta) and the Rothschild Giraffe (G. c. rothschildi), have been classified as endangered with wild populations of each of these numbering in the hundreds. Additionally, it has been suggested that the Nubian Giraffe (G. c. camelopardalis) is the most threatened of all giraffes and may number fewer than 250, but little recent information is available and consequently that estimate is labelled with considerable uncertainty.