How did the zebra get his stripes?
How The Zebra Got His Stripes is not, tragically, one of Rudyard Kipling's Just-so stories – although it feels like ought to be, alongside How The Camel Got His Hump, the whale his throat and the rhinoceros his skin.A new scientific review has attempted to answer that seemingly simple question, along with the reasons behind the colouration of a whole monochrome menagerie, from pandas to ring-tailed lemurs. Less poetic than Kipling it may be, but the conclusion, from Dr Tim Caro at the University of California, Davis, is that in many cases scientists know very little for sure about why animals are coloured the way they are. The field is still hotly debated.Even Charles Darwin and the co-discoverer of natural selection Alfred Russel Wallace tussled over the evolutionary reason for the zebra's stripes. For Wallace, the patterns helps the animals to blend into the background at dusk:It may be thought...
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