The cervical anatomy of Samotherium , an intermediate-necked giraffid

Fossils reveal a giraffe relative with a halfway-long neck. Samotherium major lived in the late Miocene, millions of years before today’s giraffes. Its neck occupied an anatomical middle ground between the extraordinarily elongated giraffe neck and the much shorter neck of the okapi, the giraffe's closest living relative.

Melinda Danowitz, Rebecca Domalski and Nikos Solounias examined fossil neck vertebrae from Samos, Greece, preserved in a German museum collection. They compared their lengths, proportions, joint surfaces and muscle-attachment structures with giraffe and okapi skeletons. Rather than treating the neck as one long measurement, they worked along its sequence of bones, asking which features resembled each living animal and which lay between them.

The answer changed along the neck. Upper vertebrae combined features resembling either giraffes or okapis, while lower vertebrae more often had genuinely intermediate forms. Samotherium was therefore not merely a modern giraffe scaled down: its neck was built from a different mixture of structures. The animal is not considered a direct ancestor of either living genus, so these bones do not document one family's uninterrupted transformation. They show that the giraffe family once contained intermediate neck designs, helping researchers separate the changes in length from the accompanying changes in shape.