Samotherium 2015 study found that "Samotherium" had a neck intermediate in length between the giraffe and the okapi, judging from examination of specimens of "S. major" from Greece. Samotherium Samotherium ("beast of Samos") is an extinct genus of Giraffidae from the Miocene and Pliocene of Eurasia and Africa. "Samotherium" had two ossicones on its head, and long legs. The ossicones usually pointed upward, and were curved backwards, with males having larger, more curved ossicones, though, in the Chinese species, "S. sinense", the straight ossicones point laterally, not upwards. The genus is closely related to "Shansitherium". According to biologist Richard Ellis and
Giraffe to reach the leaves of tall trees. This theory was eventually rejected, and scientists now believe the giraffe's neck arose through Darwinian natural selection—that ancestral giraffes with long necks thereby had a competitive feeding advantage (competing browsers hypothesis) that better enabled them to survive and reproduce to pass on their genes. The giraffe genome is around 2.9 billion base pairs in length compared to the 3.3 billion base pairs of the okapi. Of the proteins in giraffe and okapi genes, 19.4% are identical. The two species are equally distantly related to cattle, suggesting the giraffe's unique characteristics are not because