The Okapi is a mysterious ungulate, found in the heart of Africa's rainforest. Her closed relative is the giraffe, which with she shares a similar body structure - but has a much shorter neck. She uses her 35 cm long tongue to strip the leaves from branches. Solitary in nature, she roams her territory by well-worn paths and only comes into contact with the males to mate. Her striped legs originally led the early explorers to believe she was some sort of rainforest zebra, and she is so solitary and elusive that she was not known to the Western world until 1901. Now, due to poaching and deforestation, she is facing extinction and is classified as Endangered.
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