When I was first approached to take part in Inside Nature’s Giants, I immediately suggested that, if they ever had the opportunity to dissect a giraffe, they should try to hunt for an extraordinary bit of anatomy called the left recurrent laryngeal nerve. If you were designing a nerve connecting the brain to the voicebox, would you send it on a detour down into the chest to loop around one of the large arteries there, and then back up to its target organ at the top of the neck? Of course not. Yet that is exactly what the recurrent laryngeal nerve does, not because it has other business with
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