Masai Giraffe

Giraffe numbers fell by around forty percent in three decades, and the collapse went largely unremarked because the animal is common in every safari brochure and every zoo. Taxonomy compounded the blind spot: what was long treated as one species is now argued by many researchers to be four, and a genus split into four means each lineage is smaller, more localised and more vulnerable than the reassuring single total suggested.

The neck contains seven vertebrae, the same count as a mouse, each one elongated. Blood pressure is roughly double that of other large mammals, with a thickened left ventricle and tight vascular controls in the neck to stop the brain being flooded when the head drops to drink or emptied when it swings back up.