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epitome of incomprehensibility
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For some reason, this phrase made me grin when I heard it on the radio. An elephant research community or an orangutan research community wouldn't have seemed funny, so why a giraffe research community?
Maybe it's because giraffes seem obscure, because giraffes are something I learned about when I was young and then didn't really think about, so they seem like something from childhood. Perhaps it's like the unreal Vice_President_of_Cambodia.
Anyway, there was an interesting radio piece about Anne Innis Dagg, an early researcher on giraffes. She did a biology degree and went to study them in South Africa in the 1950s. After she came back to Canada, got married, and got a PhD, she started looking for a job as a professor studying giraffes. She couldn't get one. By and large, people didn't accept the idea of a woman as a science professor in the early 1960s. They didn't take giraffes that seriously either, it seems. And she didn't want to go off to study giraffes in the wild on her own, as she had young children and her husband had a settled job.
So, what does she do? Well, she wrote a comprehensive guide to giraffes that inspired others in the field. A couple of decades later, people started recognizing her for her work. She's still alive today and was one of the people talking to the radio interviewer.
Here's an article that doesn't give as much detail about her life... but it does talk about giraffe sex a bit, so here you go: https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/anne-innis-dagg-giraffes-1.3303891
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