When I was young, I liked to watch CCTV's "Animal World", and under the introduction of Zhao Zhongxiang's depressing and magnetic voice, I knew many kinds of animals, and the animal that often appeared with cheetahs was Thomson Gazelle. Most of the time, the Thomson gazelle appears as food for cheetahs, and the two of them are like a pair of friends who love and kill each other.
Thomson gazelle can run at 90 km / h, only a little slower than the cheetah, but the endurance of the gazelle is better than that of the cheetah, the cheetah generally does not run at full speed more than 300 meters when hunting, the current exact record of the cheetah sprint distance is 600 meters, and the Thomson gazelle can run at full speed about 2 km, that is to say, if the chase distance exceeds 300 meters, the gazelle can basically ensure its own safety, and the experienced gazelle will use false movements to cooperate with sharp turns to shake off the cheetah when running at full speed. There was once a theory that the gazelle ran faster in order to avoid the hunting of the cheetah; and the cheetah ran faster in order to catch the gazelle, and after countless generations of evolution, there was such a pair of small partners in the world.
Coincidentally, there is a herbivores called the horned antelope on the North American continent, although the name is called the gazelle, but the forkhorn and the gazelle are very far related, is a unique species, it runs at a speed similar to the gazelle, it can be said to be the first scud on the North American continent. But the strange thing is that the carnivores, wolves, and brown bears of the living American continent can't run so fast, why did the forkhorn antelope evolve this almost perverted speed?
Restoration of the leopard
Retrieved picture of a frightened leopard chasing a forked horned antelope
A long time ago, there was a carnivore on the North American continent called Miracinonyx, and paleontologists studied its body structure and the cheetah is very similar, and it is especially suitable for fast running, so the scary leopard is also known as the "Jaguar", in the ancient North American continent, perhaps the scary leopard and the forkhorn antelope are like the cheetah and the Thomson gazelle on the African continent.
pronghorn
But at the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago, the leopard went extinct along with many animals such as saber-toothed tigers, mammoths, and ground sloths, but the forkhorn antelope was fortunate to survive until now, alone in the North American continent.
Image source network, invasion and deletion