Few human adults gallop; the equine gait tends to be the preserve of little kids mimicking horses or exercise classes. But for camels, lions and giraffes, galloping is a key fixture of their repertoire as they shift up through the gears. However, Eric McElroy, from the College of Charleston, U.S., explains that galloping is just one form of movement from a selection of maneuvers known as “asymmetric gaits”—where the timing of foot falls is unevenly spread; including bounds performed by rabbits, crutching—when amphibious fish drag themselves by their fins across land—and punting, when fish push themselves along the sea- or riverbed with their pelvic fins. Scientists had suggested that the ability to bound and gallop only emerged after mammals first appeared on the planet 210 million years ago. However, it turns out that crocodiles can also gallop at their highest speeds and turtles bound; which made McElroy and Michael Granatosky, from the New York Institute of Technology, U.S., wonder whether animals may have evolved the ability to coordinate their limbs independently much earlier than previously thought. They published their discovery that animals probably evolved the ability to crutch, bound and possibly even gallop, 472 million years ago, long before life emerged onto land, in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
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Source: Phys.org