Fossil vertebrae reveal clues to evolution of long neck in giraffe
Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - 09:00
in Paleontology & Archaeology
(Phys.org)—A trio of researchers with the New York Institute of Technology has pieced together the neck of the now extinct giraffe-like creature Samotherium major and in so doing has found some clues that help explain how giraffes evolved to have such long necks. In their paper published in Royal Society Open Science, Melinda Danowitz, Rebecca Domalski and Nikos Solounias describe how they managed to assemble a single neck vertebrae from bones left behind by several specimens and what they learned by comparing the fossils to the skeletal structure of modern relatives.