Q.  What do you get if you cross a camel with a leopard?

A.  a Giraffe…

Before Darwin came along it seemed perfectly natural to think that crossing two completely different species would result in a hybrid having the characteristics of both its parents – just as (the admittedly very rare) tigon can be created by mating a female lion and male tiger,

a tigon

 and a zebra hinney is the result of a donkey stallion mating with a female zebra.

a zebra hinney

And so it was that in the 18^th Century my ancestor was taught that crossing a camel with a leopard gave rise to a camelopardal – a beast which we know nowadays as a giraffe. Long neck and spots – simples!

The illustration appears in one of Richard Hall´s books entitled  A Description of Beasts . Interestingly if you go to the museum of the Royal Worcester porcelain factory at Worcester you can see a splendid vase bearing an almost identical picture – also entitled a camelopardal – and it is reasonable to assume that the person decorating the vase had just such a book in front of him when he was painting.

And the latin name for the genus giraffe? Why, Giraffa camelopardalis, since it was the Romans who first ´discovered´the link between the camel and the leopard.