The family Giraffidae once held many species across Africa and Eurasia. Only two survive: the giraffe and the okapi. The shared features are easier to see up close than at a distance. Both males carry ossicones, skin-covered bone horns fused to the skull, and both have a long dark-blue prehensile tongue used to strip leaves, long enough in the okapi to wash its own eyes and ears.
The stripes are not a zebra trait. They break the animal's outline in dappled forest light and are thought to help calves follow their mother through thick undergrowth. Unlike the giraffe, the okapi is solitary outside brief mating associations, and calves spend their first weeks lying still in a nest, defecating rarely, which reduces scent for predators.
European naturalists described the species only in 1901, from skin fragments and later a complete specimen obtained by Harry Johnston, though Mbuti hunters had long known the animal. It remains hard to survey; most population information comes from camera traps and dung counts rather than direct observation.