Bruce Krzeczkowski, age 10, of St. Catharine's, Ontario, Canada, for his question;

Are there other members of the giraffe family?

The giraffe looks so astonishing that you could never mistake him for any other animal in the world. For one thing, he is the tallest. He has the longest legs and the longest neck by far. And no other animal has this pattern of creamy lines all over his chocolate brown coat. Surely, you would think, the giraffe is related to no other animal in the world and must have a family all to himself. This is what everybody thought until about 70 years ago. Then a cousin was found for the giraffe.

The giraffe is classified in the animal Family Giraffidae. The names of most animal families are rather fancy and have hidden clues. But this one explains itself. It belongs to the giraffes and if there are any more of these eye catching animals in the world, surely we would have noticed them and included them in the family. However, there was a very shy animal that nobody noticed until long after the Family Giraffidae was set aside for the giraffes.

This gentle character secludes himself in the dense shadowy jungles along Africa's River Congo. The cheerful little pygmy people who share his world knew he was there. But nobody else paid much attention to what they said. Perhaps as so often happens, the big people were too busy with their own problems to allow time for the ideas of the little people. In any case, it was not easy to find this strange animal in his dense hideaway. It was even hard to see him standing close by in the dim shadows.

But eventually he was found, brought out into the light of day and introduced to the world. At first, even the experts were flabbergasted. The stranger was as big as a mule, but he had such an unusual mixture of features that nobody knew how to classify him. They borrowed his African name and called him the okapi. Some thought he was related to the horses or to the antelopes. But for quite a while nobody dreamed that the okapi is a genuine cousin of the giraffes and a rightful member of the Family Giraffidae.

After all he has merely deer sized legs and a horsey type neck. True, his coat is remarkable but in no way does it resemble the dashing, all over design worn by the skyscraper giraffes. He wears a sleek shiny outfit of rich chocolate brown, tinged with tones of purple. His socks are white and his rump and thighs are striped with white garters. However, his long velvety face has the same gentle expression as his giraffe cousins. He also has their extra long front legs and a back that slopes down to a skinny tail ending with a wispy tuft of hair.

These features alone did not qualify the okapi as a giraffe relative. This was decided mainly by his unusual mouth. Only the giraffes have those unusual supple lips, that long flexible tongue and special teeth. So the Giraffidae family includes all the gaudy giraffes of the African plains, plus the remarkable okapi of the African Congo.

The skyscraper giraffes love company and enjoy life in large family groups. The gentle okapi enjoys solitude, though he often browses among the jungle trees with his wife. Junior Okapi is strictly a mama's boy. The mother and child usually go off and spend all their time together.