How big is Giraffe? | Scale of the Universe

The giraffe is the tallest living animal. An adult male usually stands 4.6–5.5 meters (15–18 feet) tall, and females reach up to about 4.3 meters (14 feet). Giraffes live on the dry savannas and in the open woodlands of sub-Saharan Africa, where their height allows them to feed on leaves that almost no other animal can reach.

Size

A giraffe's size is its height, from the ground to the top of its head. Guinness World Records gives 4.6–5.5 meters as the usual height of an adult male. The San Diego Zoo gives males up to 5.5 meters and females up to 4.3 meters. Males are also much heavier, weighing up to 1,360 kilograms (3,000 pounds), twice as much as females.

As of 2026, the tallest giraffe on record is George, a Masai giraffe from Kenya who lived at Chester Zoo in England. He stood 5.8 meters (19 feet) tall when he was nine years old, and his head almost grazed the roof of the zoo's 6.1-meter (20-foot) giraffe house. He died in 1969.

Size comparisons

A tall male, 5.5 meters high, is more than three times as tall as a person 1.7 meters (5 feet 7 inches) tall.
A giraffe's neck alone, about 1.8 meters (6 feet) long, is longer than that person is tall.
The top of a tall male's head is nearly twice as high as a basketball rim, which is 3.05 meters (10 feet) above the floor.
A tall male is about 1.7 times as tall as an average male African savanna elephant is at the shoulder, 3.2 meters.

A long neck

A giraffe's neck has seven bones, called vertebrae, the same number as a human neck, but each one can be about 25 centimeters (10 inches) long. With its long neck, a giraffe can reach leaves, shoots and flowers high in trees. Males also use their necks to fight, swinging their heads like clubs in contests called necking.

Pumping blood up to a brain about 2 meters above the heart takes a strong heart. A giraffe's heart weighs up to 11 kilograms (25 pounds) and produces nearly twice the blood pressure of a typical mammal.

Calves

A giraffe calf is born after a pregnancy of about 14 months, and it drops about 2 meters (7 feet) to the ground as it is born. A newborn is already about 1.8 meters (6 feet) tall, taller than a person 1.7 meters tall, and it grows about 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) a day during its first week.

At birth, the two furry, horn-like knobs on a giraffe's head, called ossicones, are soft and lie flat. They stand upright within the first week, and later turn to bone and fuse to the skull. Both males and females have them.

Four species

Giraffes were long thought to be a single species. Studies of their genes and skulls by the Giraffe Conservation Foundation and its partners have shown that there are four: the northern, reticulated, Masai and southern giraffe. The giraffe experts of the IUCN, the international conservation union, reached the same conclusion. As of 2026, the foundation estimates that about 140,000 giraffes remain in Africa, almost 30 percent fewer than 35 years ago.