According to a piece on the NPR site, Sarah the cheetah has died at the age of 15 at the Cincinnati Zoo. Or, rather, she was euthanized, for she was old and her health was failing. The site notes that the average age of a cheetah is 12-15 years, but that appears to be longevity in captivity, as the Smithsonian says that nobody has studied longevity of this species in the wild. Sarah, also called “Sahara”, was clocked as the fastest known land mammal, a record you can see in the video below:
Sarah (also named Sahara) was famous for her astonishing speed. We blogged about her on the Two-Way in 2009, when she set the speed record for land mammals: 100 meters in 6.13 seconds.
Three years later, she smashed her own record and set a new one: 100 meters in 5.95 seconds. (For context, Usain Bolt’s best time — and humankind’s best effort — is 9.58 seconds.)
She hit 61 mph on that run, National Geographic reports.
A NatGeo editor said the animal looked like “a polka-dotted missile.
Here’s Sarah breaking the record. I may have posted on this before, but it’s worth seeing again:
If you like cheetahs, watch this video, too. Listen to them purr!
Finally, for d*g lovers, NPR adds this:
Sarah was also notable as one of the first cheetah cubs to be raised with a puppy companion — an Anatolian shepherd named Alexa, or Lexi.
The two animals were “lifelong companions,” writes Cathryn Hilker, the founder of the zoo’s Cat Ambassador program and the woman who hand-raised Sarah as a cub.
This is just not right!:
Now I’ll ask you to guess what the fastest known land ANIMAL is; put your answers below, and no Googling!
Does a Peregrine falcon count as a land animal? That’s my guess.
Flea jump?
Trick question? I think it’s a cheetah.
Awww, Sarah and Lexi look lovely together. BFF!!
On land – the Cheetah
I really like to see the control, even more than the speed. The head is level. The tail is skillfully used to help steer. Lovely.
I consider myself an accommodationist when it comes to cats and d*gs being together. I just like ’em both.
I agree with drbob and wanstronian. Peregrine falcons can dive at 250 mph, so they are clearly the fastest dinosaur and fastest animal in any medium. are reputed to run up to 75 mph, but the Sarah trials are the best documented and she hit 60. I think pronghorns also make around 60, but the cheetah is generally considered the fastest *land* animal. I don’t think that there is a trick involving insects. Dragonflies go about 30 mph and, although fleas can jump many times their body length, I don’t think they move very fast. So, unless Ceiling Cat is just playing with her subjects, I’ll go with peregrine, then cheetah.
If there’s some sort of trick to the question, I’ll be the one to venture the answer: humans.
Otherwise I’m sticking with the cheetah. I’m not calling a speed-diving bird the fastest land animal.
By “land animal” I meant “terrestrial animal” so birds can count too.
But (sound of hairs being furiously split) that would have to be *on land*, wouldn’t it? Not flying? So ostriches could count, but not falcons?
cr
I’m making the rules here!
“Peregrine falcons can dive at 250 mph, so they are clearly the fastest dinosaur and fastest animal in any medium. are reputed to run up to 75 mph”
RUN at 75 mph?? I’d love to see that!
oops. The word ‘cheetahs’ was let out of that sentence. It was supposed to say, ‘Cheetahs are *reputed* to run up to 75 mph, but the Sarah trials are the best documented and she hit 60’.
I’d say the flea that hopped off Sarah’s nose just as she hit peak speed.
Our cats and dogs have always got along wonderfully. You should see Katia (dog) playing with Benny (male cat). It is right! Dogs and cats get along much better than sibling humans. 😉
The answer is here. That video shows 183 mph, but the same individual also was clocked at 243 mph.
I wonder if this counts 😉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner
The falcon’s high-speed dive is not powered flight but more like what Sheriff Woody Pride called “falling with style”. Felix Baumgartner also fell with style but at much higher speed than a falcon. I concede that his ascent was not self-powered like the falcon’s, so maybe Baumgartner is DQed on that basis.
Well, if you’re allowed to use gravity (like the falcon does) – but sticking to ground-based records – like the falcon doesn’t – it would have to be a skier:
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/01/sport/simone-origone-world-record/
What, he used artificial aids? That’s what we monkeys *do*.
cr
Well, if we’re going to include people, the answer isn’t a skier or some dude falling out of a balloon, it’s one of the three guys who were on Apollo 10, the fastest of the moon rockets. Just like the others, they used technology to get all of the potential energy built up in themselves, but they were going two orders of magnitude faster!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10
Hey, just wanted to point out that Cheetahs cannot retract their claws, like most felines. So, she had something in common with her d*g companion. Cheers.
Too bad. I always like to see world-class athletes leave a sport still at the top of their game — the way Jimmy Brown did. I mean, why hobble off the field a wreck, when you can head out to Hollywood and make a living smooching Raquel Welsh?
A similar fate should’ve met a track-and-field star like Sahara Sarah.
Who say’s she didn’t retire at the top of her game? Did she make other unsuccessful record attempts as her powers waned?
She died which is sad but inevitable for all living creatures including Jimmy Brown (though I believe he’s not dead yet and I wish him many more years of health and happiness).
Magnificent beast! A blur with spots. It would almost be a privilege to be run down and eaten by such an amazing creature.
The fastest known land animal is surely my Dad going for his rocker and the remote for the TV after supper.
Thank you. A amazing video.
I think the fastest land animal is a bird such as a hawk.
I might have broken the rule. I did go to Wiki in order to find out if birds are land animals. ThEy are. I did not read more than that.
You could have looked out the window!
What happens to Alexa? Here friend is gone. Does she get a new cheetah or what? I am sure she is very sad.
15 would be quite elderly for a dog that size, but if Alexa is still alive, I’m sure she’s mourning the loss of her friend.
White-Throated Needle-Tail Swift, falling is cheating.
I’d been thinking of a swallow or swift myself, but wouldn’t have known which species to pick.
I was going to say the same thing myself, but you beat me to it. If flying counts for this record, swifts are the fastest in level flight. If falling counts, then the honor goes to Felix Baumgartner, who fell many times faster than a peregrine falcon, with Joseph Kittinger being a close second.
But if you control for size…in this case, body lengths per second (bl/s), the winner is:
😀
(The species referred to in the first paragraph are 2 tiger beetles and a cockroach.)
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141021-the-fastest-insect-in-the-world
Aha! IT took a few seconds for the braincell to shuffle Hollerith cards, but the answer popped out, because I’d seen it in the last few months.
To misquote Clinton (the Philanderer, not the Philanderee), it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. If you think “is” is “is”, you end up in semantic feather splitting over recent dinosaurs. but if you think that “is” is “when measured in a relativistic unit of speed of body-lengths per second”, then you get an answer of some repellent little invertebrate – Australian, possibly – which can clock in several dozen body lengths per second, while a chetah strolls along at 10-12 bl/s.
Unfortunately, I’ll need to either Google, or search my hard drive (I think I saved the paper locally) to fill in the details. Nope, not coming up …
Here we go, courtesy of Not(Evil) Inc : Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) (27 April 2014). “Mite sets new record as world’s fastest land animal”. Featured Research. ScienceDaily.
Great minds…
I may have mailed the story to Prof CC(E).
Sarah’s or our mite’s?
The mite. I remember searching for the paper, but not finding it un-paywalled. Or something like that.
Bah. That’s the same type of reasoning that fawns over how strong ants are relative to their body size. The square cube law explains why smaller organisms can outperform larger organisms on a pound for pound basis. So, if you want to compare how well organisms do compared to how well it’s possible to do with their body size, you need a better metric than just per pound or per body length.
That was cool, but I am more amazed by the footage of cheetahs actually chasing prey in the wild because the insanely fast, zig-zagging changes in direction that go on as the prey tries to out maneuver the cheetah.
The fastest creature I’ve personally seen up close was my friend’s red tailed hawk. He raised it from a chick (?) and he used to fly and feed it around a church lot in our neighborhood. The hawk would fly up high, often landing on the steeple atop the church. My pal would hold out a piece of chicken in a heavily gloved hand, blow a whistle, and the hawk would dive bomb down absolutely ramming into his hand with it’s talons. It would force his arm right back.
Then one day he wanted to try something (dumb young guys as we were). The Hawk was on the steeple, my friend took off the glove and held the food in his bare hand, with bare short-sleeved arms. He blew the whistle and the hawk dive bombed down toward him. But this time, at the last moment, it opened it’s wings and landed softly on his hand, not harming my friend. It blew us away.
From then on, if my pal had a glove on, it would slam into his hand, but if he held the food bare-handed, the hawk would always modify it’s flight and land softly. It really was amazing to see.