Objective: To investigate the morphological characteristics of Trichuris sp. from giraffe in Hefei wild zoo and identify its species using molecular techniques.
Methods: Morphological characteristics of Trichuris collected from giraffe were analyzed. The internal transcribed spacer 1（ITS-1） was amplified by PCR and the PCR product was sequenced. The resulting sequence was homology analysis in GenBank and its heredity evolution tree was constructed by MEGA 4.0 software.
Results: The male worms had a body length of 35.89-58.56 mm, an esophagus to body length ration of 0.29-0.40, and a spicule length of 1.96-3.89 mm. The thick and thin proportions of body were 7.02-23.45 mm and 28.05-40.05 mm respectively. These data showed different degrees of variation with previous reports. The PCR resulted in a product of 491 bp, comprising part of 18S rRNA and full length ITS-1. Sequence alignment showed that the identified Trichuris was most homologous（98.6%） with T. bos taurus HE608848, T. capreolus JX218218, and T. japanese AB367795, but it was only 46.0% homologous with T. discolor AB367794. In the heredity evolution tree, it was not located on the same branch as T. discolor, T. ovis and T. bos taurus.
Conclusions: The Trichuris sp. collected from giraffe is different from previous reports in morphology and ITS-1 sequence. Further research is needed to determine if it is a new species.