Students often learn that giraffes (Giraffa spp.) evolved their sinuous necks to eat high-dangling leaves that stumpier competitors couldn’t quite reach. However, thickened skull and vertebrae fossils of the early giraffe relative Discokeryx xiezhi indicate it headbutted rivals to win mates, which may help explain why today’s giraffes evolved such stretchy necks, a study published yesterday (June 2) in Science finds.
Researchers found the giraffoid’s skull and four cervical vertebrae fossils, which date to about 17 million years ago, in 1996 in the Junggar Basin of northern China, reports Nature. Analyzing the fossils revealed a thickened cranium with a disk-shaped structure that acted like headgear, along with a complicated array of head-and-neck joints and similarly-thickened vertebrae, all of which made D. xiezhi well-suited for cranial combat, according to the study.
“Discokeryx has extreme morphologies of the head and neck adapted for head-butting behavior,” study coauthor and paleontologist Jin Meng tells ...
