Giraffes’ long necks might be for more than reaching the best leaves on trees. New fossils from a prehistoric giraffe show that its helmetlike head and thick neck bones let it headbutt rivals to impress mates.

Jin Meng is a paleontologist at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History who helped find and analyze the fossils. At the dig site, Meng noticed some neck bones near the skull. Neck bones don’t usually provide much information. But these bones helped show that this animal had some of the best headbutting equipment known to science!