Consider the giraffe Within minutes, they can stand on their trembling, catwalk-model legs and suckle at their mother’s four teats, biting off the little wax caps that have formed in the preceding days to keep the milk from leaking out.
I never knew about this definition of browsing, but the logo of The Browser web site should have been a clue:
We don’t know why the giraffe looks as it does. Until relatively recently, its neck was explained in the way Darwin suggested: the ‘competing browsers hypothesis’ posits, commonsensically, that competition from browsers such as impala and kudu encouraged the gradual lengthening of the neck, allowing it to reach food the others couldn’t. Recently, though, it has been shown that giraffes spend relatively little time browsing at full height, and the longer-necked individuals are more likely to die in times of famine.
That, and plenty of other surprising facts, are in that column, as there always are in Katherine Rundell’s columns.