Charles Ford, age 13, of Florence, South Carolina, for his question:

Is a giraffe classified as a horse?

There is a story about a suspicious lady's first visit to a zoo. She beheld the astonishing giraffe and firmly remarked that she refused to believe it. Maybe so, but seeing is believing. This realistic point of view was taken by the Roman populace when Caesar's conquering legions brought home a captive giraffe from Africa. The Romans accepted the startling stranger as a real animal, but they came forth with some astonishing notions to explain his oddities.

Classifying animals has been popular among nature lovers since the days of the Greek scholar Aristotle, who lived more than 2,000 years ago. The few priviliged boys who attended school in ancient Rome were taught that leopards were classed with the cat tribe and camels belong in a different class of animal. But their notions of classification must have been quite vague. For around 46 B.C., the educated few decided that the giraffe was an off beat creature whose father was a camel and whose mother was a leopard.

When Caesar brought the astounding animal from Africa he was exhibited in a zoo. The startled townspeople had never seen anything like him and promptly named him the camelopardalis. True, the stranger was much taller but he had the build and graceful pacing gait of a camel and his handsome hide was marked with leopard like blotches. Later researchers realized that the camelopardalis belonged in a family of his own. Perhaps they met people who were used to seeing him in his native Africa. There he was known to Arabs as the "zafara," meaning the swift graceful creature. This word was borrowed and adapted to give the giraffe his more suitable name.

Africa is an immense realm and giraffes in widely separated regions tend to have variations in their markings. Some zoologists prefer to class them as two species in the genus Giraffa    of the family Giraffidae in the suborder Tylopoda. The camels belong in another family of a different suborder. But the unrelated horses belong in an entirely different order.

Until the turn of this. century, zoologists supposed that the unique giraffes were the only living members of their family. Then the okapi was discovered, deep in the dark African jungles. At first he was thought to be some sort of horse. But the mule¬sized creature did not have the right teeth, hooves and several other essential features to qualify in the horse family. More detailed investigations proved him to be a rightful member of the previously exclusive giraffe family.

The okapi does not have the long neck or the surface markings of his giraffe cousins. But he does have their unique skin covered bony horns. He also shared a number of other basic family features, including long front legs that give him a sloping back, specialized chewing teeth and a graceful pacing gait. The giraffe cousins all pace by alternating the two right feet forward, then the two left feet.