Today I will be talking about the Okapi. I hope you enjoy.

Okapi is the only living relative of the giraffe. This animal lives in the northern, central and eastern parts of the Congo. Okapi prefers dense and damp vegetation, so it inhabits rainforests. They were discovered in 1900, with 45,000 animals that lived in the wild at the time. At the moment they are never listed as “near threatened”, which means that they could easily become endangered in the near future.

Females are larger than males. On average, okapi weighs between 440 and 700 pounds. They can be up to 6.5 feet tall and reach 8.1 feet in length. the okapi has dark purple or reddish brown velvety fur. They also have white horizontal stripes on their front and hind legs.

Okapi slightly resembles zebra because of the stripes, but it shares much more similarities with a giraffe. It has a long skull, large black eyes and very long, purplish tongue, just like a giraffe. The tongue is 18 inches long and it can reach both its eyes and ears. The tongue is prehensile, which means that it is used for stripping leaves and buds from stems of various plants. Besides leaves, okapi eats fruit, grasses, ferns, and twigs.

Click here for more and click here for a video about the Okapi.

I hope you guys enjoyed! Bye!