To biologists, the giraffe’s long neck is a prime example of evolution’s handiwork, cited by both Charles Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck as support for their evolutionary theories. But it is also an engineering problem. In order get oxygen up its 2-meter neck to its brain, a giraffe’s heart constantly pumps blood at a pressure roughly 2.5 times higher than is normal in humans. Now, a new giraffe genome is revealing genetic alterations that allow these animals to live happily with hypertension—along with other genes linked to giraffes’ unusual physique.