Did you know that your neck and that of a giraffe have something unexpected in common?

Watching a giraffe raise its head towards the branches is enough to give an impression of excess. Its neck seems so far from ours that one could imagine a long chain of extra bones. However, there are seven cervical vertebrae, as in human beings.

The difference lies in their lengthening. The same number of pieces does not necessarily produce the same proportions. The neck of the giraffe reminds us that an anatomical plane can take on very different dimensions without changing the number of elements that we are counting.

The familiar image had set us a small trap: longer had to mean more. A look inside reverses this intuition. Between our neck and this spectacular neck, nature has not simply added floors. It has transformed the proportions of a construction whose count remains surprisingly close.