How cheetahs outpace greyhounds
Wednesday, June 20, 2012 - 23:30
in Health & Medicine
Cheetahs are the high-performance sports cars of the animal kingdom, but how do they outstrip other elite athletes when using the same sprint technique? Penny Hudson, Sandra Corr and Alan Wilson from the Royal Veterinary College, UK, compared the performance of captive cheetahs and greyhounds and found that in addition to increasing their stride frequency, the cheetahs spend longer in contact with the ground, probably to protect their limbs from stress fractures at high speed.