Cheetah Watching
by Catherine Sherman
Title
Cheetah Watching
Artist
Catherine Sherman
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
"Cheetah Watching" by Catherine Sherman.
This cheetah is one of two I saw at the Caldwell Zoo in Tyler, Texas. I was also lucky enough to see a female cheetah with four cubs in South Africa two days in a row. So far, I haven't seen a cheetah run, however, which I would really love to see. Cheetahs are the fastest land animal and can reach 70 miles an hour.
The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) is a big cat that occurs mainly in eastern and southern Africa and a few parts of Iran. The cheetah has a slender body, deep chest, spotted coat, a small rounded head, black tear-like streaks on the face, long thin legs and a long spotted tail. Its lightly built, slender form is in sharp contrast with the robust build of the other big cats. The usually yellowish tan coat is uniformly covered with nearly 2,000 solid black spots.
The cheetah's lanky body is specialized for speed. A hunting cheetah can averages 40 miles per hour (64 km/h) during a sprint; with a few short bursts of speed, when the animal can clock 70 mph (112 km/h).
A cheetah-like cat once lived in North America, but went extinct. The pronghorn animal, the second fastest land animal, is thought by some scientists to have evolved its speed to escape the North America cheetah. Its speed greatly exceeds any existing American large predators. I went to a paleontology dig in northcentral Wyoming, where a cheetah-like cat was found in a large pit-like cave called The Natural Trap, along with many other animals from the Pleistocene Epoch (Ice Age), which ended about 11,000 years ago.
Featured in "Our 4-Legged Friends" group (11/30/2016); "ABC Group" (03/20/2017)
Uploaded
November 25th, 2016
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