Don’t forget the pressure problem, even if the giraffe could keeps its head above water if its body was submerged very far it couldn’t expand its lungs. Surely young giraffes could encounter water deep enough to require swimming in their native environment.
Could be, Arnold, or at least what this post from the other thread says:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=1001704#post1001704
(But I think Fishhead is probably actually talking about Mole Rats, rather than true gophers.)
Even a giraffe might need to swim occasionally. Ok, adults are 15+ feet tall, but there are big rivers in Africa that are probably deeper than that (Nile, Zambezi) and giraffes occur on both sides of them. Although there are several described subspecies, they don’t seem to be correlated with rivers (as for example those of apes are), implying that occasional individuals get across to maintain genetic continuity.
I’ve been trying to dig up the original source of the Scherpner quote, without much luck. My guess it’s from Cristophe Scherpner of the Frankfurt (Germany) Zoo, who published several acticles on animals in the 50s and 60s. He may have been some associate of Grzimek. Anyway, “native companions” wouldn’t have sounded that dated in 1972, when Grzimek published the account.
I have to admit the Scherpner observation sounds rather odd. I would have expected the giraffe’s body to float higher in the water. On the other hand, if they were wading I wouldn’t see any reason for them to stretch their necks out in front of them as he describes.
Well, that might have been an issue for giant sauropods, but I doubt it’s true for a giraffe. Remember its body would be at most six feet or so under water if its head were exposed, and I don’t think even a human, with a much less powerful rib cage, would have much trouble breathing through a snorkel at that depth.
[[Well, that might have been an issue for giant sauropods, but I doubt it’s true for a giraffe.]]
Ooooh! A new debate. Could large bronto-type dinosaurs swim?
Hard to tell about actual swimming, but according to Bakker the evidence (as opposed to artist’s traditional renderings) is that they avoided wetlands.
Not a debate. There are trackways that show impressions of forefeet but no hindfeet, implying that they were mostly floating along while propelling themselves with the forefeet barely touching bottom. (Alternative explanation: they suspended their hindquarters from dirigibles. Discuss.)
The main debate is whether some extremely long-necked brachiosaurs, that stood maybe 45 feet high and had nostrils on the top of their heads, were adapted to wading in deep water. The water pressure arguement is used to contend they were not. Nowadays it is usually assumed that the long necks and forelimbs of brachiosaurs were adaptations to browsing on the tallest trees.
Heck, I can debate that. The tracks don’t necessarily imply swimming. I have found here a picture of a hippopotamus with feet barely touching the ground, and it’s not swimming.
Ok, Arnold, very good. I always thought Hyacinth was cute. Now show us one of her with just the front feet touching! 
But seriously, how would you know that the tracks are forefeet and not hindfeet? I thought that part of the shape of tracks are determined by the flesh covering the bones, and we don’t really know what dinosaur flesh looked like (e.g. a particular dinosaur’s skin could have been covered with huge fleshy warts or else smooth as snake’s skin for all we know.)
The hindfeet of sauropods are quite different in structure from their forefeet. For one thing, the forefeet had a single prominent claw on the inside front toe, lacking in the hindfoot, and were also substantially smaller. In one set of tracks, found in Texas in the 1930s, the marks of the front feet alone, barely touching the mud, make up most of the trackway, but at one point there is a mark where a hindfoot touched down, and at that point the trackway changes direction. Evidently the animal was moving along by using its front feet, then kicked out with a hind foot to change course. Besides that, there are lots of other sauropod trackways in which the marks of fore and hind feet can easily be disinguished.
There is also evidence that large carnivorous dinosaurs could swim, from trackways that show just the toe tips, as if the animal was moving along in deep water by just barely touching bottom with its hind feet. In his book Predatory Dinosaurs, Gregory Paul has a highly imaginative drawing of a swimming sauropod being pursued through the water by a pack of allosaurs like a school of sharks.
Um, and Arnold? The general shape of tracks is usually determined by the underlying bone structure, and only their detail by the surrounding flesh. For example, it’s really pretty easy to tell human handprints from footprints just on the basis of knowing the underlying bone structure. 
A correction on the foot structure of sauropods: Instead of lacking claws on the hindfoot as I said, actually most had three large claws on the hindfoot (the other toes apparently being capped by blunt hoof-like nails). And while most had only one claw on the forefoot, a few had more. I don’t know what I was thinking. :o
I should also acknowledge that Arnold could have a point where elephants are concerned. The fore and hind feet are quite similar in structure, and there is a large fleshy pad under the heel that makes the footprint circular instead of conforming closely to the underlying bony structure. It might actually be difficult to distiguish the prints of an elephant’s forefeet and hindfeet in isolation. However, in sauropods the prints of fore and hindfeet are generally easily distinguished.
Interestingly, the “duckbill” dinosaurs (ornithopods), traditionally pictured as being semi-aquatic, probably were entirely terrestrial. As pointed out by Bakker and others, they had bony reinforcement rods in the tail that would have prevented it from being swished side to side for swimming as in a crocodile. Also, the idea that the front feet were webbed seems to be in error, based on misinterpretation of certain petrified dinosaur “mummies” that preserved impressions of the flesh on the forefoot. That is not to say ornithopods didn’t ever enter the water, just that they were not adapted for swimming as formerly supposed.
Now if I had to pick an animal that probably couldn’t swim it would be a stegosaur. Loaded down by bone plates, and with a very low slung head, I doubt one could have kept its head out of the water. Among fossil mammals, glyptodonts (giant armored relatives of armadillos) would have had similar problems.
Ah ha! I knew it! In your face Colibri! (performs victory dance) 
But seriously, it seems to me that the tracks of many animals could depend on the flesh as well as the underlying bone structure. You came up yourself with the example of the elephant (which I hadn’t thought of). Other suggestions: What about the gecko lizard? Or what if an octopus slithered along the ocean floor? Though I suppose an octopus doesn’t really leave “tracks” per se.
Please do not construe this as meaning that I am challenging your statement about distinguishing forefeet from hindfeet in the case of sauropods.
Well, sure. But for vertebrates the skeletal structure of a foot is usually well enough correlated with the external form (number and length of toes, etc.) that it’s pretty easy to tell what general type of animal made the track. This breaks down when we get to the fine details. For example, it would probably be easy to tell that certain tracks were made by some kind of cat, but although different species could be distinguished if one were familiar with the living animal, this could not be done if all one had to go on were the skeletons. Similarly, gecko tracks might be identified as belonging to a lizard or other small reptile, but it might be difficult to match the track with exactly which one from just the skeleton. And if one found fossil footprints of a web-footed bird, it would could be hard to distinguish a duck from a flamingo, say. (Pelicans, on the other hand, could be distinguished because the foot structure is quite different.)
And of course when you get to soft-bodied invertebrates, all bets are off. There are all kinds of fossil trackways that can only be identified as “some kind of crawling thing” - they could have been made by snails, various kinds of worms, etc. This even extends to some hard parts - there are various kinds of small shelly-type fossils that were evidently from some kind of invertebrate, but we don’t have a clue as to what phylum they represent.
Let’s not get carried away, Arnold. Actually I’m having a lot of fun trying to picture what a Swiss victory dance looks like.
How many giraffes do you have to test to confirm. For example I can’t swim and I know of three other people that can’t you toss us in the Atlantic and we would drown. But clearly it is wrong to conclude humans can’t swim.
What if you toss 3 giraffes in the
Atlantic and they drown but the forth one swims.
Is one enuff to conclude they can swim as a whole?
::wanders into Comments on Staff Reports forum for the first time::
::notices thread about giraffes::
::reads post after ghoulish post about chucking giraffes into large bodies of water::
::runs shrieking back to the safety of MPSIMS::
Well, dammit, Giraffe, now that you’ve seen this, help us resolve this once and for all!
Can you swim or not???
::steps up to the microphone::
(ahem)
Ladies and Gentlemen, members of the press,
I’d like to state publicly and for the record, that I can in fact swim. It’s not pretty, and I can’t swim for long distances, but by thrashing around, I can propel myself through the water. Lacking adequate body fat, however, I don’t float, so the swimming is a short-term thing at best. If I’m in a shipwreck, I’m either clinging to some flotsam or I’m going down like a groupie on Metallica’s tour bus.
Thank you.
Thank you, Giraffe! I rest my case!
I think the part about giraffes being top heavy is not pertinent.
Any animal will make simple changes to restore its balance. In the giraffe’s case it’s simply a matter of lowering the head, something it does to drink anyway. Now there’s plenty of “keel” in the legs.
As for standing on the bottom. that only works until you reach the center of gravity, which is probably in the haunches. After that the giraffe would float. And keeping the head straight out, moving its legs would send it forward like a horse.
This used to be a popular pastime back on the Ark. Whenever Noah or one of his boys got bored they’d throw an animal over the side and make bets on whether or not it could swim. It turns out that all animals can swim. Except unicorns.
I think this thread is itself antediluvian.