For decades (probably even for more than 150 years) non-evolutionary biblical creationists have been saying there is no fossil evidence to show how giraffes got their long necks. I thus searched to see if there is such evidence I found that there is, though it looks like it wasn't recognized as evidence until the year 2015. The following are links to two news articles about the scientific discovery. I provide links to two articles because each article includes information not mentioned in the other article.
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ancient-fossils-show-how-giraffe-got-its-long-neck/
- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/how-giraffes-became-winners-by-a-neck
The CBS News article says in part the following.
'For years, there has been scant fossil evidence showing how the
giraffe evolved to have such an admirably long neck. But now, the
remains of a 7-million-year-old creature with a shorter neck provides
proof that the giraffe's iconic feature evolved in stages, lengthening over time, a new study finds.
The researchers are calling the remains of this ancient beast
true "transitional" fossils, not only closing an evolutionary gap in
the rise of Earth's tallest animals, but also providing concrete
evidence of how one creature evolved into another.
"We actually
have an animal whose neck is intermediate [in length] -- it's a real
missing link," said Nikos Solounias, a professor of anatomy at the New
York Institute of Technology (NYIT) College of Osteopathic Medicine and the lead researcher on the study.
The creature in question -- Samotherium major --lived during the Late Miocene in the forested areas of Eurasia, ranging from Italy to China, Solounias said.'
The National Geographic article says in part the following.
"Truly long-necked giraffes didn’t evolve until about 7.5 million years ago. Samotherium, Palaeotragus, Bohlinia, the extinct Giraffa sivalensis and the living Giraffa camelopardalis
preserve enough transitional features to let Danowitz and colleagues
reconstruct how this stretching occurred. It wasn’t simply a matter of
drawing out their vertebrae as if they were in some sort of anatomical
taffy pull. The front half of the neck vertebrae became elongated in Samotherium and Palaeotragus, generating forms intermediate between today’s Giraffa and their foreshortened predecessors. Then, within the last two millions years or so, the lineage leading up to the modern Giraffa
elongated the back half of their neck vertebrae, giving them even more
reach and making them literally at the top of their class."
See also https://www.science.org/content/article/odd-creature-ancient-ancestor-today-s-giraffes . It says something very important, namely the following. "The team’s analyses of bones from all three animals bolster that notion—and not just because the neck bones are of a length between the giraffe’s and the okapi’s.
For example, ridges and other features that are prominent on the
okapi’s neck bones and missing entirely on the giraffe’s are typically
present but smaller on Samotherium’s, the researchers report online today in Royal Society Open Science."
