During a freak rainstorm on 29 February, two giraffes were struck by lightning in Rockwood, a conservation area in South Africa. While it may seem unsurprising that the tallest animals on the planet face this hazard, scientists had never described this occurrence in any detail until now.

“It came as a bit of a surprise to me because the whole day was quite quiet in weather, and suddenly there was this big storm,” says Ciska Scheijen, a conservation scientist at Rockwood who had been following a …