1 Long Neck, 4 Species: New Giraffe Diversity Revealed

A new study reveals there's more to the animals' species diversity than once suspected. The study researchers collected and analyzed DNA from skin samples representing 190 giraffes from across Africa, the first such analysis to include data from all nine formerly accepted subspecies. The 18th-century naturalist Carolus Linnaeus provided the first scientific description of a giraffe in "Systema Naturae" in 1758, using a Nubian giraffe — one of the now-defunct subspecies — as a model.