A Natural History of Giraffes PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download A Natural History of Giraffes PDF full book. Access full book title A Natural History of Giraffes by Dorcas MacClintock. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Dorcas MacClintock
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 152
Get Book
Book Description
Text includes everything you might want to know about giraffes, including herd structure, reproduction specifics, spot patterns, and their relationship to other animals and man.
Author: Dorcas MacClintock
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 152
Get Book
Book Description
Text includes everything you might want to know about giraffes, including herd structure, reproduction specifics, spot patterns, and their relationship to other animals and man.
Author: Dale Peterson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520266854
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 230
Get Book
Book Description
Presents a cultural, historical, and pictorial history of giraffes, describing their biology and behavior and demonstrating their grace and elegance through over one hundred photographs.
Author: Michael Allin
Publisher: Delta
ISBN: 0385334117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230
Get Book
Book Description
In October 1826, a ship arrived at Marseille carrying the first giraffe ever seen in France. A royal offering from Muhammad Ali, Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt, to King Charles X, she had already traveled 2,000 miles down the Nile to Alexandria, from where she had sailed across the Mediterranean standing in the hold, her long neck and head protruding through a hole cut in the deck. In the spring of 1827, after wintering in Marseille, she was carefully walked 550 miles to Paris to the delight of thousands of onlookers. The viceroy's tribute was politically motivated: He commanded the Turkish forces then fighting the Greeks in their war of independence, and hoped his gift would persuade the French not to intervene against him. But the viceroy and his intentions were quickly forgotten as France fell in love with its "beautiful stranger." Zarafa chronicles the full story of this remarkable animal, revealing a kaleidoscope of history, science, and culture that opens an exotic window on the early nineteenth century. From the Enlightenment's blossoming fascination with science to Napoleon's ill-fated invasion of Egypt in 1798–from the eminent French naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire to Bernardino Drovetti, French consul general in Egypt and tomb robber extraordinaire–the era was full of memorable events and characters. Michael Allin deftly weaves them into the story with an appreciation for detail and an uncommon affection. The giraffe's strange and wonderful journey linked Africa and Europe in mutual discovery. Although her arrival did not keep the French out of Ali's war, she became an instant celebrity in Paris and over the next eighteen years she fascinated all of Europe. Through Michael Allin's narrative skill, Zarafa stirs the imagination as it provides a new context for the history of a distant age.
Author: Edgar Williams
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861898894
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 177
Get Book
Book Description
Their extraordinary long necks, distinctive camouflage, graceful movements, and friendly nature have made giraffes one of the most fascinating and beloved animals on the planet. But while giraffes once roamed the Great Plains of Africa in huge herds, their numbers have greatly diminished, and they are now entirely dependent on humanity for their survival. In Giraffe, Edgar Williams explores not only the biology of the tallest animals on earth, but also their impact on human history—including in ancient Egypt, where giraffes were kept as exotic pets; the Middle Ages, when giraffes were considered mythical beasts as improbable and mysterious as the dragon; and the Victorian era, in which giraffe hunting was considered an exhilarating sport. Giraffe is the first book to provide a comprehensive, twenty-first-century view of the giraffe in art, literature, film, and popular culture, as well as its natural history from prehistory to modern times. With new insights into the giraffe’s genetics and evolution, this book will appeal to those interested in the giraffe’s unique biology and to anyone who admires the majestic giraffe.
Author: Meish Goldish
Publisher: Bearport Publishing
ISBN: 1597163740
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 28
Get Book
Book Description
Find out how the world's tallest mammal uses its height to find food, stay safe, and even help other animals escape from enemies.
Author: Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig
Publisher: MV-Verlag
ISBN: 3869914718
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146
Get Book
Book Description
"Darwin (1871) and many African folk legends before him [...] proposed a simple but powerful explanation for the large and elongated shape. Long necks allowed giraffe to outreach presumed competitors, particularly during dry-season bottlenecks when leaves become scarce; (Simmons and Scheepers). However, this old African folk legend which is still commonly taught in high schools, fails to explain, among other things, the size differences between males and females. Giraffe cows are up to 1.5 meters shorter than the giraffe bulls, not to mention the offspring. The wide migration range of the giraffe and the low heights of the most common plants in their diet likewise argue against the dominant selection hypothesis. Also: 1) The fossil "links," which according to the theory should appear successively and replace each other, usually exist simultaneously for long periods of time. 2) Evolutionary derivations based on similarities rely on circular reasoning. 3) The giraffe has eigh t cervical vertebrae. Although the 8th vertebra displays almost all the characteristics of a neck vertebra, as an exception to the rule the first rib pair is attached there. 4) The origin of the long-necked giraffe by a macromutation is, due to the many synorganized structures, extremely improbable. 5) Sexual selection also lacks a mutational basis and, what is more, is frequently in conflict with natural selection ("head clubbing" is probably "a consequence of a long neck and not a cause"; see also Mitchell et al. 2009). 6) In contrast to the thus-far proposed naturalistic hypotheses, the intelligent design theory is basically testable. 7) The long-necked giraffes possibly all belong to the same basic type inasmuch as 8) a gradual evolution from the short-necked to the long-necked giraffe is ruled out by the duplication of a neck vertebra and the loss of a thoracic vertebra. 9) Chance mutations are principally not sufficient to explain the origin of the long-necked giraffe. 10) The intelligent design theory offers an adequate and satisfying solution to the problems and points to numerous "old" and new research projects. 11) Mitchell and Skinner present a good analysis of the selectionist problem; however, their phylogenetic hypotheses presuppose the correctness of the synthetic evolutionary theory, and their claims of "intermediate forms" are unproven (similarly summary Part 2). Part 1 shows why Dawkins and Kutschera are wrong. The scientific facts speak for design."
Author: Graham Mitchell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197571190
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 609
Get Book
Book Description
This is a comprehensive overview of wild and free-living giraffes. Graham Mitchell combines nearly every piece of published research about this species into the pages of this book, making it an incredibly useful book for researchers, scientists, and naturalists studying a single species.
Author: Olivier Lebleu
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538142252
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201
Get Book
Book Description
This engaging account traces the remarkable history of France's first giraffe, a diplomatic gift from Egyptian Pasha Muhammed-Ali to King Charles X in 1826. “Zarafa,” taken by boat from Egypt to Marseilles and walked all the way to Paris, was accompanied by her Arab handlers and a famous French naturalist. She drew vast crowds along her route, sparking a giraffomania that was widely documented in art and literature. Her initial journey and then long and celebrated residence in Paris encapsulates nineteenth-century French socio-political history and highlights the emerging evolutionary theories of the time. Over fifty illustrations from the period illuminate this rare encounter with a unique animal that is now endangered and deserving of our greater attention and understanding.
Author: Anne Innis Dagg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107034868
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 261
Get Book
Book Description
An up-to-date portrait of the giraffe, summarising current knowledge on their biology and behaviour along with current conservation efforts.
Author: Anne Innis Dagg
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773599754
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Get Book
Book Description
When Anne Innis saw her first giraffe at the age of three, she was smitten. She knew she had to learn more about this marvellous animal. Twenty years later, now a trained zoologist, she set off alone to Africa to study the behaviour of giraffe in the wild. Subsequently, Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey would be driven by a similar devotion to study the behaviour of wild apes. In Smitten by Giraffe the noted feminist reflects on her scientific work as well as the leading role she has played in numerous activist campaigns. On returning home to Canada, Anne married physicist Ian Dagg, had three children, published a number of scientific papers, taught at several local universities, and in 1967 earned her PhD in biology at the University of Waterloo. Dagg was continually frustrated in her efforts to secure a position as a tenured professor despite her many publications and exemplary teaching record. Finally she opted instead to pursue her research as an independent “citizen scientist,” while working part-time as an academic advisor. Dagg would spend many years fighting against the marginalization of women in the arts and sciences. Boldly documenting widespread sexism in universities while also discussing Dagg’s involvement with important zoological topics such as homosexuality, infanticide, sociobiology, and taxonomy, Smitten by Giraffe offers an inside perspective on the workings of scientific research and debate, the history of academia, and the rise of second-wave feminism. A new preface relates Dagg’s experience as the subject of the documentary The Woman Who Loves Giraffes.
