How Fleet the Feet of the Pachyderm?
“Biomechanics: Are Fast-Moving Elephants Really Running?” J.R. Hutchinson, D. Famini,
R. Lair and R. Kram, Nature, vol. 422, no. 6931, April 3, 2003, pp. 493-4(http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/422493a).
(Thanks to Jörgen Linder and Jost Weber for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, who are at various institutions in Thailand and the U.S., explain that:“Usually, the various criteria for walking and running are consistent, making it relatively easy to distinguish walking from running, but this is not true in the case of elephants. Our observations suggest that, at greater speeds, elephants do more than merely walk.”
(That’s an excerpt from the article “Improbable Research Reviews,” Published in AIR 14:3.)