Albino giraffe!

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Sevikins

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Saw this in the Daily News and found a longer article from livescience.com


http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/050908_white_giraffe.html

A researcher in Africa has finally spotted the rare white giraffe that he's been seeking for twelve years, and he's got a photograph to prove it.

Charles Foley, a Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) researcher, first heard rumors of the white giraffe in 1993 when he was working in Tanzania's Tarangire National Park doing research on savanna elephants.

Intrigued, Foley set out to find the animal, but by the next year, the sightings had stopped coming in.

"I assumed it had died, either at the hand of man or best," he said. "I never stopped looking though."

Foley's persistence paid off this summer. While conducting a routine aerial survey of a group of the park's elephants, he spotted a white speck in the distance.

"I looked…blinked…looked again…and it was still there," Foley said.

Foley told his pilot to make another pass over the spot and managed to snap a photograph of the white giraffe just as they flew over the trees.

"The proof is there to see—a mostly white giraffe with small dark blotches on its body," Foley said. "Only the bottom half of its legs were the more traditional brown color."

Foley doubts the giraffe he photographed is the same giraffe sighted in 1993, and that it is probably not a pure albino animal. Albino animals lack the pigments that give their skin color. Rather, Foley thinks the giraffe was probably just lighter than normal.

His original picture
A closer picture:
white%20giraffe.jpg
 
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wow

there is an albino cow on a farm near where I live - well I assume it's an albino because I've never seen an all white cow before, he/she also has pink around the eyes
 
Maybe it's been in the sun too long. I used to have a giraffe on the dashboard of my car who turned white with light yellow spots.
 
We had a giraffe here in Denver named Bill who had gone completely white.

He simply lost all his spots and looked just like the one in the photo. They always had a sign "Why is Bill white?" "No, he's not an albino, Bill has just lost all his spots..."

He lived an extremely long time, he died not too long ago.
 
That's really cool. I got to see giraffes out in the wild in Africa and they are really something to watch. They look really unnatural and uncoordinated, but they actually move gracefully, almost in slow motion. Seeing them in the zoo just doesn't compare.
 
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