"The Blue Giraffe" is a science fiction short story on the concept of mutation by American writer L. Sprague de Camp.

He is called to a wildlife preserve in the Okavango River Delta by George Mtengeni, the local warden, to investigate the sighting of a strange blue giraffe.

Together with Mtengeni, he observes not just the animal in question but another giraffe with a goat-like beard, only six feet long, a green hippopotamus with pink spots, and a two-headed rhinoceros.

Establishing camp in the bush, the two are separated when the warden goes out into the night for firewood and Cuff, hearing what he takes for a native woman's scream from another direction, heads off to investigate.

When daylight comes and Cuff can finally see her clearly, he discovers Ingwamza too is a mutation; despite her generally human proportions, she has greenish-yellow hair, a short tail, and the head of a baboon.

He deduces that Hickey must have been experimenting on the animals with radiation, and his device, never deactivated, has continued to affect the germ plasm of any who wander near it, until their altered descendants have finally attracted outside notice.

... [D]e Camp was capable of imagining what previously would have been thought of as lesser beings–[such as] a tribe of mutated baboons in 'The Blue Giraffe' (Astounding, Aug 1939) ... as being as decent, rational and civilized as most men manage to be, and maybe even more so.

"[4] Other uses of intelligent non-human primates by de Camp can be found in his earlier short story "Living Fossil" (1939) and the later novel Genus Homo (1950) written in collaboration with P. Schuyler Miller.

De Camp reuses the plot elements of the protagonist gaining sanctuary with a nonhuman race, facing an unwelcome marriage, and being saved by the reluctant bride's betrothed in his later novel The Pixilated Peeress (1991).

In that novel Thorolf Zigramson, the hero, is adopted into a tribe of "trolls" (remnant Neanderthals), whose chief seeks to cement the alliance by the same expedient attempted by Indlovu in "The Blue Giraffe."