The Social Lives of Giraffes

Many of the cloven-hoofed mammals are herd animals, living in large groups that typically have dominance hierarchies and other relatively complex internal structure. We see this in both of the main families of such animals: the deer and the "cattle family" (which includes goats, sheep, and antelopes besides the obvious). On the other hand, there are certainly plenty of exceptions. Smaller deer, such as muntjacs, for instance, tend to be relatively asocial, apparently gaining more benefit by hiding from predators than they would from living in large and watchful, but visibly obvious, herds.

But it isn't just the smaller cloven-hoofed mammals that can lack sophisticated social lives, because the same also seems to be true of the largest of all such animals: the giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis). At which point, I should probably take a brief diversion to explain what a giraffe is, and where it fits in the larger mammalian family tree.

Miocene (Pt 23): Giraffes Become Tall, Hippos Stay Dry, and Antelopes... Get Eaten

Palaeotragus, a short-necked giraffe

About half-way through the Late Miocene, around 8 million years ago, worldwide temperatures began to drop significantly, and even tropical Africa did not escape the effects. In its case, this didn't lead to cold and barren steppelands, and, indeed, the world may still have been slightly warmer than it is today, but there is evidence of the expansion of grasses across many parts of the continent. Perhaps enhanced by the closure of the Mediterranean Sea during the Messinian Salinity Crisis and disruption of the monsoons, North Africa also became much drier than before, although whether the Sahara as we know it today dates back quite that far remains controversial; there is some evidence of sand dunes that far back, but also of numerous rivers crossing the region.

These changes in climate also affected the animal life on the continent, to the benefit of some and the detriment of others. Pigs are omnivorous animals, and one might expect them to have survived such changes relatively unscathed. In a sense, this is true, since they remained common on the continent, but the nature of particular species living there did change.

Let's Split the Party!

Last week, I described how, over the last few decades, populations of gray seals have recovered from a near-total local extinction in US waters. Clearly, other species facing similar threats, across the world, have not been so lucky. The rapid pace of human expansion simply overwhelms the ability of some species to cope, whether it be through direct effects (expansion of agriculture, cities, transport networks, and so on) or indirect ones (climate change, most obviously).

In the millions of years before humans appeared on the scene the world was changing at a slow enough pace that it was possible for mammal species to evolve their way out of a problem. Many didn't, of course, and went extinct, but others gave rise to newer species that outlived them. Today, it's not just the scale of the changes humans are making that has caused problems for some species, but also their speed.

When it comes to dealing with very rapid changes in the environment - whether human-caused or otherwise - mammals have both advantages and disadvantages compared to some other species. On the negative front, mammals, especially the larger ones, have long generation times, meaning that any effect of evolution, even on a relatively minor scale, is inevitably going to be slow.

Miocene (Pt 19): When Rhinos and Giraffes Went South

Prolibytherium

At the dawn of the Miocene, 23 million years ago, Africa was a very different place than it is today. This was as much due to simple geography as anything else. For one thing, the Sahara Desert didn't exist yet - even the most extreme estimates suggest that it didn't begin to appear until the Late Miocene, and it may well have not have formed until at least the Pliocene around 4-5 million years ago. Before this time, much of the continent was probably covered in warm, damp, forests interspersed with patches of more open woodland and scrub.

More significantly, perhaps, Africa was still an island continent, separated from Eurasia by a body of water called the Tethys Seaway. It had been like this, isolated from the rest of the world, for millions of years, during which time it had developed its own unique animal life, quite different from that elsewhere. At the time, the same was true of South America (and it still is for Australia), but that continent retained its unusual animals for much longer, not contacting the north until as recently as 2.5 million years ago, shortly before the first of the Ice Ages. When that did eventually happen, it led to the Great American Interchange, which set the scene for much of the American fauna we see today.

Miocene (Pt 6): The Coming of the Mice

Palaeotragus

The Early and Mid parts of the Miocene epoch were, for the most part, times when the world was much warmer than it is today. It wasn't a steady pattern, however, and I've already described how the fluctuations in climate, over the course of many millions of years, affected the rodents of Europe. It was a time when the most common small mammals in Europe were not mice and voles, but dormice, accompanied by early hamsters, squirrels, and the gliding eomyids.

By 10 million years ago, however, the colder, drier climate had become locked in for the long term. We know that the forests of Europe changed dramatically at this time, the old subtropical trees, such as figs and palms, being replaced by oak, alder, and elm. Likely as a result of this change in the available food supply, most of the dormice died out, leaving only a few close relatives of the relatively small number of species we have today.

Short-Necked Giraffes of Spain

The giraffe family is a classic example of a mammal 'family' that consists of very few living species. Giraffes are sufficiently distinctive, and, arguably, odd, that they clearly deserve a family of their own, yet there just aren't very many of them. Exactly how many living species there are in the family is currently the subject of a dispute, since there is good reason to suppose that the animal we actually know as "a giraffe" represents multiple species, but many researchers feel that the hard evidence for that supposition is lacking. What we can say is that, apart from the giraffes proper, there is only one other living species in the family - the okapi.

Fortunately, being large creatures, prehistoric giraffes tended to leave reasonably decent skeletons behind. They're distinctive in more ways than you might think, too, having, for example, a particularly odd canine tooth that ends in two or three (admittedly small) points, rather than just the one. So our knowledge of fossil giraffes is fairly good, and it turns out that there were a lot more species of them in the past than there are today - they were once a larger, and more widespread group.

New Mammal Species 2016

Reticulated giraffes

2016 has, on the whole, been a bit of a rubbish year. Or so the common wisdom has it; one suspects that, for instance, the deaths of some particularly prominent celebrities at the beginning of the year has heightened our perception of those that died later on (relative to any other given year). And it's probably been quite a good year for you if happen to be a Trump supporter, or a fan of Nigel Farage.

But that debate doesn't belong here, instead, as the year draws to a close, it's time to take a survey of the species of mammal that have been newly discovered this year. Or, more accurately, newly named, since what we generally do these days is find some population of a previously known species that turns out not to belong to it, and to be something else instead. There have, as always, been a fair number of them this year, and there's no guarantee that they'll all stand the test of time, and still be considered valid species in, say, 2026.

My survey is, therefore, inevitably biased, with a just a semi-random sample of some of the species announcements I happen to have come across. Most of them are going to be small animals, since they're easier to overlook in the first place, but there are a couple of quite large ones. And, by "large", I don't mean just "wolf-sized", either.

Pliocene (Pt 11): A Profusion of Pigs

Probably the most numerous large mammals in Africa today are the antelopes, of which there are a great many species. In this respect, the Pliocene was not much different, with antelopes providing a large part of the diet of the various carnivores that lived before the Ice Ages, from lions and hyenas to sabretooth cats. However, the mix of antelope species was different then that it is now, not least because of the generally lusher environment that existed in Africa during the earlier part of the epoch.

Even so, most of the antelopes of the day were related to species that we would recognise today. For example, even at the very beginning of the epoch, around 5 million years ago, South Africa boasted a gazelle similar in size to a modern springbok. Indeed, springboks proper appeared around 3 million years ago in the same general locality, where they were represented by at least two extinct species until one of them (probably Antidorcas recki) evolved into the iconic modern animal.

The gazelles of the early Pliocene were likely different in their habits from the modern sort, being more adapted to woodland than open plains, but, moreover, they were not as common, comparatively speaking, as they are now. Instead, it appears that, at least in East Africa, a group known as the spiral-horned antelopes (about which I will have a lot to say elsewhere on this blog over the coming months) were rather more numerous.

Fossil Giraffes of Ethiopia

Giraffes on the Serengeti

There is some debate about exactly how many species of giraffe there are alive today. The official answer is 'just the one' (Giraffa camelopardis), but there may be two or even three, depending on how you define a 'species'. Certainly, it isn't very many, and if there really is more than one, then they all look pretty similar.

Looking slightly further afield, the entire giraffe family contains just one other living species - the okapi. Superficially, okapis may not look much like giraffes, but that's largely because, when we think 'giraffe' we tend to focus on the incredibly long legs and neck, and, perhaps, on the crazy-paving coat pattern. An okapi is quite different in both of these respects, but, when you look at the head alone, its resemblance to giraffes is much clearer.

Still, an okapi is not an actual giraffe, any more than a fox is a wolf. There may, therefore, only be one species of true giraffe alive today. But, as is so often the case with these small groups of animals, the family becomes rather larger once we include in all the extinct species. True, giraffes have never been as numerous as some other kinds of large herbivore, and the total number of species that we know of is far less than we have of, say, bovines. But it's certainly more than one.

Perhaps one of the most important questions we'd like such fossils to help us answer is why giraffes are so tall when okapis, for example, are not. This isn't as easy as it might appear. If you visit somewhere like the British Natural History Museum, or the Smithsonian, you'll see huge articulated skeletons of dinosaurs on display. It's perhaps natural to assume that what you see is more or less what somebody dug out of the ground. Sure, the original may have been squashed or distorted a bit, but generally speaking what they found was a single skeleton. Right?