Set (deity) or a fennec fox. The animal has a curved snout, long rectangular ears, a thin forked tail and canine body, with sprouted fur tufts in an inverted arrow shape; sometimes, Set is depicted as a human with the distinctive head. Some early Egyptologists proposed that it was a stylised representation of the giraffe, owing to the large flat-topped "horns" which correspond to a giraffe's ossicones. The Egyptians themselves, however, made a distinction between the giraffe and the Set animal. During the Late Period, Set is depicted as a donkey or as having a donkey's head. The earliest representations of what
Nubian giraffe by Swedish zoologist Carl Linnaeus in the "Systema Naturæ per regna tria naturæ, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis" in 1758. He described the giraffe from Ethiopia or Sennar of Eastern Sudan. A 2016 analysis of giraffe subspecies proposed the Rothschild's giraffe ("G. c. rothschildi") could be considered a conspecific ecotype of the Nubian giraffe, however these results are not definitive. Following Linnaeus's description of the Nubian giraffe, several specimens were described by other naturalists and zoologists since the end of the 18th century under different scientific names, which are all considered synonyms of "Giraffa camelopardalis