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"It's fascinating what our researchers out in the field found,"
Julian Fennessy, co-founder of the Giraffe Conservation
Foundation, told Reuters in a videocall on Friday. "We were very
surprised."
Most giraffes grow to 15 - 20 feet (4.5 - 6 metres), but in
2018, scientists working with the foundation discovered an 8
1/2-foot (2.6 metre) giraffe in Namibia. Three years earlier,
they had also found a 9-foot 3-inch (2.8 metre) giraffe in a
Ugandan wildlife park.
They published their findings in the British Medical Journal at
the end of last month.
In both cases, the giraffes had the standard long necks but
short, stumpy legs, the paper said. Skeletal dysplasia, the
medical name for the condition, affects humans and domesticated
animals, but the paper said it was rare to see in wild animals.
Footage taken by the foundation showed the Ugandan giraffe
standing on thick, muscled legs in the dry savanna of Murchison
Falls national park in northern Uganda, while a taller animal
with the usual long, stick-like legs walked behind it.
"Unfortunately there's probably no benefit at all. Giraffes have
grown taller to reach the taller trees," Fennessy said. He added
that it would most likely be physically impossible for them to
breed with their normal-sized counterparts.
Numbers of the world's tallest mammal have declined by some 40%
over the past 30 years to around 111,000, so all four species
are classified by conservationists as 'vulnerable'.
"It's because of mostly habitat loss, habitat fragmentation,
growing human populations, more land being cultivated," Fennessy
said. "Combined with a little bit of poaching, climate change".
But conservation efforts have helped numbers start to recover in
the past decade, he added.
(Editing by Gareth Jones)
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