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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.
The weight of the animal is normally borne by both the sole and the edge of the hoof wall. Hooves perform many functions, including supporting the weight of the animal, dissipating the energy impact as the hooves strike the ground or surface, protecting the tissues and bone within the hoof capsule, and providing traction for the animal.
Perissodactyls have a mesaxonic foot, meaning that the weight is distributed on the third toe on all legs thanks to the plane symmetry of their feet. There has been a reduction of toes from the common ancestor, with the classic example being horses with their single hooves.
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 ...
Among extinct animals, most early mammals such as pantodonts were plantigrade. A plantigrade foot is the primitive condition for mammals; digitigrade and unguligrade locomotion evolved later. Among archosaurs, the pterosaurs were partially plantigrade and walked on the whole of the hind foot and the fingers of the hand-wing. [1]
Related: Rare 2-Headed Calf Was Just Born and Everyone Is in Awe The chick was born with four legs. It drew quite the crowd as people flocked to check out something they may never seen again.
Charolais calves which were transferred, as embryos, into their Aberdeen Angus and Hereford recipient mothers. Calves may be produced by natural means, or by artificial breeding using artificial insemination or embryo transfer. [5] Calves are born after nine months. They usually stand within a few minutes of calving, and suckle within an hour.
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 ...