Articulated giraffe keychain

Eating high up

Giraffes are the tallest land animals: according to San Diego Zoo, males grow up to 5.5 metres tall and females up to 4.3 metres. Their favourite food is acacia leaves. With their tongue of about 46 centimetres and their mobile lips, they pluck them from between the long thorns.

In the nineteenth century the giraffe was already an example in the theory of evolution. Lamarck thought giraffes got long necks by stretching towards high leaves, and that they passed that trait on to their young. Geneticists largely rejected that idea in the 1930s.

Fighting with the neck

In 1996 Robert Simmons and Lue Scheepers published a different explanation in the journal The American Naturalist. They pointed out that giraffes often feed low down and not always as high as possible. According to them, the long neck is mainly the result of the contest between males, which fight with their long, heavy necks for the highest rank and for females. Bigger males have a better chance of mating.

In such a fight, males swing their necks against each other. As a male gets older, calcium deposits form on its skull, which protect it when it exchanges head blows with other males.

A neck with seven vertebrae

• Like us, a giraffe has seven neck vertebrae; each one can be longer than 25 centimetres.
• The neck is about 1.8 metres long and weighs about 272 kilos.
• The heart is about 60 centimetres long and weighs around 11 kilos.
• Males and females both have two hair-covered little horns, the ossicones.

Biocraftlab's giraffe

Biocraftlab's figure is a cute version with a short, sturdy neck, brown spots and hinged legs. Thin parts such as a neck and legs are often the places on a 3D print that take the most force. How strong such a print is and what that depends on, you can read in the knowledge-base article on the strength of a 3D print.