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
West African giraffe giraffe" are now known to be the Kordofan giraffe ("G. c. antiquorum"). Older studies on giraffe subspecies have caused some researchers to question the separate status of "G. c. peralta" and the Kordofan giraffe ("G. c. antiquorum"). Genetic testing published in 2007 confirmed the distinctiveness of the West African giraffe. Most captive giraffes from northwestern Africa are in French zoological parks, a result of the history of French colonialism in what was French West Africa. Those giraffes were formerly treated as "G. c. peralta". However, since genetic analysis revealed that only giraffes to the west of Lake Chad belong to