From: winner@cuavax.dnet.cua.edu
Subject: Re: Elephants CAN'T gallop
Organization: The Catholic University of America
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 13:50:37 GMT

In article <2832@fedfil.UUCP>, news@fedfil.UUCP (news) writes:
> In article <1992Jul21.183247.3020@desire.wright.edu>, sbishop@desire.wright.edu writes:
>> Ted, you have been told on numerous occasions that elephants can't gallop due
>> to their conformation.  

[...pointless, inaccurate insults deleted...]

> Elephants don't gallop because they're too fricking heavy.
>> In case you don't know what that word means, it 
>> means the way they are built.  Ostriches and kangaroos can't gallop either.
> Ostriches and kangaroos are essentially bipeds.  

Lets start by making sure that we are all using the same meaning of gallop!!
Gallop can simply mean to run fast, and fast is a relative not absolute term.
Therefore any track athelet can gallop compared to me (as could an elephant, 
who could easily out run me at the slowest maximum speed that has been 
offerred.)  Since saying an elephant can't run fast without comparing "fast" 
to something is a waste of time, I (and I beleive others here) am assuming that
you mean the specific gait (a natural 3-beat gait of horses) known as a gallop.

The ability to do a 3-beat gallop is a question of body design as much as any
thing else (though I would guess that some animals might be physically capable
of a gallop but have just never had a reason to develop one.)  As for ignoring
that certain animals don't gallop because they have only 2 legs, lets look at
4 legged examples.  Do cats gallop?  Personally, I can't think of any running 
motion I have ever seen in a cat or a dog that would be called a gallop, yet 
they are not particularly heavy, and cats are very well known for being able
to withstand quite amazing falls without injury.  In a cat, where is the 
correlation between being able to gallop, body size, body weight, gravity, and
danger in falls?  I also cannot imagine any lizard doing a gallop.  Their body
structure is much to far off, of the basic fish-style walking movement does not
seem to me to be gallop oriented.

>> And Mammoths were not larger than elephants, you've been told that repeatedly
>> also.
> Maybe best that you should repeatedly tell the authors of Guiness.  Page 111
> of their 1991 edition mentions fragmentary remains indicating a shoulder
> height of 14.5'.  I believe that's just a bit bigger even than jumbo.  Not
> a whole lot bigger, mind you, but big enough that a mammoth should not be 
> able to gallop.

A couple simple direct questions...
Do you beleive that all 4 legged animals are structurally designed for galloping
given appropriate gravity?
If so, do you beleive that lizards gallop?
If not, what aspects of an elephants structure leads you to beleive that it
would be able to gallop given appropriate gravity
 
> That was the whole point.  I have at least one picture of a big mammoth,
> galloping.
> Russians probably see more pictures of mammoths while coming up through
> school (the Russians, not the mammoths), than we do, and I've asked a 
> number of them about this.  Several have claimed to have seen pictures of 
> mammoths
> galloping.

I assume that your referring to cave paintings.  (I think mammoths came before
camcorders.)  A cave painting of a mammoth in a pose that looks like a gallop
is a piece of information, but I would not rely too heavily on it as a biology
lesson about mammoths.

> Again, this cannot happen in our world at present.

Especially since mammoths are extinct.  (And in most areas cave painting is
illegal, at least in the US.)

> Ted Holden

-Jim Winner
Newsgroups: talk.origins