As illustration only: a giraffe from a Shahnama
Izzaddin Ibn Al-Athir Al-Jazari: Tuhfat al aja’ib wa turfat al ghara’ib (The Gift of Wonders) (1350) called by Ullmann: pseudo ibn al Athir
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Taken from: Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms: Festschrift for Wolfhart ...edited by Beatrice Gruendler, Michael Cooperson
Is related to Al Qazwini’s work and contains an entry on the giraffe
Giraffe.
Its head is like the head of the camel, its horns like the horns of a cow, its skin like the panther, its legs like the camel, and it hooves like the cow. It has a very long neck, long forelegs and short hind legs. It most of all resembles the camel. Its skin is very similar to that of the panther, and its tail is like the tail of a gazelle. They say that the giraffe is brought forth by the Abyssinian she camel, the wild cow and the hyena. This means that the hyena in the land of the Abyssinia mates with the she-camel, which results in an animal that is something in between a camel and a hyena. If the young is male and meets a wild cow, the result is a giraffe. Timan the Sage (1) reported that in the direction of the south, close to the equator, animals of various kinds come together in the summer at watering places because they are very thirsty, and then sometimes animals mate with animals from other species, which results in animals such as a giraffe and a sabu and the isbar (male wolf&female hyena) and similar creatures.
(1) Timan the Sage: Timothy of Gaza. He was a Greek grammarian active during the reign of Anastasius, i.e. 491-518AD. He is the author of a book on animals.