Today's sunrise

Sunrise or sun up is the instant at which the upper edge of the Sun appears on the horizon in the east. The term can also refer to the entire process of the sun crossing the horizon and its acompanying atmospheric effects.

The giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) is an African even-toed ungulate mammal, the tallest of all extant land-living animal species, and the largest ruminant. Its scientific name, which is similar to its archaic English name of camelopard, refers to its camel-like face and irregular patches of color on a light background, which bear a vague resemblance to a leopard's spots. The giraffe is also noted for its extremely long neck and legs and prominent horns. It stands 5–6 m (16–20 ft) tall and has an average weight of 1,200 kg (2,600 lb) for males and 830 kg (1,800 lb) for females. It is classified under the family Giraffidae, along with its closest extant relative, the okapi. There are nine subspecies of giraffe, which differ in size, coloration, pattern and range.

The giraffe's range extends from Chad in the north to South Africa in the south and from Niger in the west to Somalia in the east, but it is very scattered. Giraffes usually inhabit savannas, grasslands and open woodlands. They prefer areas with plenty of acacia trees, which are important food sources. Owing to their extreme height, giraffes can browse for vegetation that most other herbivores cannot reach. While adults are nearly invulnerable to predation, lions, leopards, spotted hyenas and wild dogs prey on calves. Although they commonly gather together, giraffe aggregations usually disband every few hours. Male giraffes use their necks to hit each other in combat, a behavior known as "necking". Dominant males each mate with multiple females. Females bear the sole responsibility for raising their young.

The giraffids are ruminant artiodactyl mammals that share a common ancestor with deer and bovids. The biological family Giraffidae, once a diverse group spread throughout Eurasia and Africa, contains only two living members, the giraffe and the okapi. Both are confined to sub-saharan Africa: the giraffe to the open savannas, and the okapi to the dense rainforest of the Congo. The two species look very different on first sight, but share a number of common features, including a long, dark-coloured tongue, lobed canine teeth, and horns covered in skin, called "ossicones".

The Pecora is a group of hoofed mammals that comprises most of the ruminants, including cattle, sheep, goats, antelopes, deer, giraffes, and pronghorn. The only extant members of the Ruminantia that are not pecorans are the chevrotains, which lack horns and whose four-chambered stomach is less developed than those of the pecorans. This gives rise to the pecorans sometimes being called "horned ruminants". Pecorans are also known as "higher ruminants", because they arose more recently than other ruminant groups. Although Pecora is a well-supported clade, the exact relationships among families within it are in dispute.

Flower, W.H. (1883). "On the arrangement of the orders and families of existing Mammalia". Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1883: 178–186. 

Hassanin, Alexandre, & Douzery, Emmanuel J. P. (2003). "Molecular and morphological phylogenies of Ruminantia and the alternative position of the Moschidae". Systematic Biology 52 (2): 206–228. doi:10.1080/10635150390192726. PMID 12746147. 

Ruminantia includes many of the well-known large grazing or browsing mammals: among them cattle, goats, sheep, deer, and antelope. All members of the Ruminantia are ruminants: they digest food in two steps, chewing and swallowing in the normal way to begin with, and then regurgitating the semi-digested cud to re-chew it and thus extract the maximum possible food value.

Not all ruminants belong to the Ruminantia. Camels and llamas are among the exceptions, a suborder known as Tylopoda. Also, there are a number of other large grazing mammals that, while not strictly ruminants, have similar adaptations for surviving on large quantities of low-grade food. Kangaroos and horses are examples.

The Tragulidae are the basal family in the Ruminantia.

The ancestral Ruminantia karyotype is 2n = 48 similar to that of cetartiodactyls.

The even-toed ungulates (Artiodactyla) are ungulates (hoofed animals) whose weight is borne about equally by the third and fourth toes, rather than mostly or entirely by the third as in odd-toed ungulates (perissodactyls) such as horses.

Artiodactyla comes from the Greek words artios, meaning entire or even numbered, and dactylos for finger or toe. This group includes pigs, peccaries, hippopotamuses, camels, chevrotains (mouse deer), deer, giraffes, pronghorn, antelopes, sheep, goats, and cattle. The group excludes whales even though DNA sequence data indicate that they share a common ancestor, making the group paraphyletic. The more phylogenetically accurate group is Cetartiodactyla.

There are about 220 artiodactyl species, including many that are of great nutritional, economic, and cultural importance to humans.

A further distinguishing feature of the group is the shape of the astragalus (talus), a bone in the ankle joint, which has a double-pulley structure. This gives the foot greater flexibility.