All Aboard—Unexpected Passengers on Noah’s Ark
Visitors to the Ark Encounter are often surprised by the animals that are “missing.” At the top of many lists is one of the great icons of Noah’s ark: long-necked giraffes.
Go ahead and look around. Walk the ship from bow to stern, port to starboard, bottom deck to the top. Nowhere will you see a pair of classic giraffes towering above your head.
What you will find, housed in a large enclosure on the middle deck, are some spotted creatures, perhaps around your height, with relatively short necks and stocky bodies. These odd-looking beasts look strikingly like Shansitherium , a creature you’d find in a few natural history museums. Yet the sign indicates that these are the Ark Encounter’s representatives of the giraffe kind. How could this be?
So it is the AiG position that Giraffes descended from some phenotype absent the historical record. But what we see from deep history is this:
Ironically, the giraffe has been a past exemplar offered by creationists as an example of an animal that could only have been created as such, given that much physiology has to be adapted to its elongated neck.
The giraffe’s neck: another icon of evolution falls
A problem for evolution is that the giraffe’s entire body—both its anatomy and physiology—is tightly intertwined as a single functional unit. The giraffe is actually an excellent icon for intelligent design because its extreme complexity requires all of the pieces to be in place before its neck structure is functional.
Giraffes Walking Tall … by Design
Many have asked how the giraffe got all these interesting features. Some suggest that you can start with a non-giraffe and, through successive small changes, end up with a giraffe. However, the fossil evidence of giraffes in the past shows them to be much the same as the ones we see in Africa today. Fossil evidence of transitional forms, or ‘not-quite-giraffes’, is “completely lacking”.
So, just like that, creationists have gone from the giraffe no way no how could have evolved over millions of years, to done in a couple of generations, no problem.