The World's Fastest Animals
Created | Updated Apr 5, 2006
Everyone knows that the cheetah is the world's fastest animal. That's just common fact. The cheetah is certainly a fast critter and the fastest land predator alive today. But his cousins have some amazing speed stories, too.
Land Animals
Cheetah
The cheetah is fast. Very fast. Depending on the animal, and the observer's relationship to it, it can go from zero to sixty miles per hour in mere seconds. Cheetahs have even been reported to sprint as fast as seventy-five miles per hour. That's a quick kitty.
Dog
Greyhounds are incredible breed of dog. They have developed many of the same characteristics as a cheetah (enlarged heart and lungs, thin frame, short coat, etc...) through deliberate convergent evolution (selective breeding). These animals have been bred for thousands of years to run fast in order to hunt, and, more recently, race. The greyhound is not alone as a speedster among dogs.The Saluki and the Afghan Hound have also been bred for extreme speed. Each breed has had at least one member sprint at an instantaneous velocity of forty-five miles per hour. Typically, however, greyhounds will hover around forty miles per hour on the dog track while the Saluki and the Afghan Hound will clock in at a respectable thirty-five miles per hour.Pronghorn
As the fastest North American mammal, pronghorns can reach speeds of sixty miles per hour. At high speed they cover the ground in great strides of fourteen to twenty-four feet, and are known to run for long distances at speeds of forty miles per hour.
Marine Animals
Animals That Fly
Peregrin Falcon
Man
Man can move at speeds in excess of six hundred miles per hour. In very special jets and rockets man can even move at speeds in excess of six thousand miles per hour. These speeds, however, require the use of external machines. A human without the aid of special machines moves much slower.
In many other lists of speedy lifeforms man is consistently ranked at above twenty, and sometimes twenty-five, miles per hour. True, for a few seconds the very best athletes in the world can obtain an instantaneous velocity of twenty to twenty-five miles per hour. However, if one were to take an ordinary or truly representative individual from the population the chosen individual would probably not reach more than ten or twelve miles an hour and could probably only sustain four or five miles an hour over a distance of greater than a few miles. Humans, for all the bipedal advantages, just can't hold a candle to our four-legged cousins.
