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Feet have evolved many forms depending on the animal's needs. One key variation is where on the foot the animal's weight is placed. Some vertebrates: amphibians, reptiles, and some mammals such as humans, bears, and rodents, are plantigrade. This means the weight of the body is placed on the heel of the foot, giving it strength and stability.
Under good conditions, a healthy female tapir can reproduce every two years; a single young, called a calf, is born after a gestation of about 13 months. [36] The natural lifespan of a tapir is about 25 to 30 years, both in the wild and in zoos. [37] Apart from mothers and their young offspring, tapirs lead almost exclusively solitary lives.
The following is a list of selected animals in order of increasing number of legs, from 0 legs to 653 pairs of legs, the maximum recorded in the animal kingdom. [1] Each entry provides the relevant taxa up to the rank of phylum. Each entry also provides the common name of the animal.
In animals, the process involves a sperm fusing with an ovum, which eventually leads to the development of an embryo. Depending on the animal species, the process can occur within the body of the female in internal fertilization, or outside in the case of external fertilization. The fertilized egg cell is known as the zygote. [2] [5]
Infants might be up to 6 feet tall – like in the case of a Masai giraffe calf – or as hefty as a 250-pound Asian elephant calf. Zoo babies, big and small, are born every year.
Plantigrade animals, such as humans, normally walk with the soles of their feet on the ground. Unguligrade animals, such as horses and cattle, walk only on the distal-most tips of their digits. Digitigrade animals walk on their distal and intermediate phalanges; more than one segment of the digit makes contact with the ground, either directly ...
A new analysis of three-toed fossil footprints that date back more than 210 million years reveals that they were created by bipedal reptiles with feet like a bird’s.
Another example is the blue wildebeest, the calves of which can stand within an average of six minutes from birth and walk within thirty minutes; [5] [6] they can outrun a hyena within a day. [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] Such behavior gives them an advantage over other herbivore species and they are 100 times more abundant in the Serengeti ecosystem than ...