• These cats are fast. They can typically reach speeds of up to 98 kilometers per hour (61 miles per hour), and can go from 0 to 60 Mph in just 3-seconds, which is faster than most super-cars.
• Their stride length becomes as long as 7m (23ft) at full pace, which means the cheetah spends more than half the time airborne.
• It may look large and cumbersome, but when on the chase, the tail of the Cheetah plays an important role. It actually helps to steer the cheetah as it runs, like a rudder on a boat.
It’s not a cheetahs speed that’s their greatest attribute when hunting, it’s this agility — their skill at jumping sideways, changing directions quickly and slowing down almost instantly.
• A team or researchers found that Cheetahs hunting tactics were specific to characteristics of their prey, and are far more sophisticated than thought.
Research suggests that cheetah chases comprise two phases – the first phase insolves rapid acceleration to catch up with prey. The second phase involves slowing down five to eight seconds before the end of the chase, where the cheetah will predict and match movements of the prey, as the distance between them closes
• Carbon dating has estimated the age of some cheetah fossils as being between one and two million years old.
• Unlike big cats like the lion, cheetahs are unable to roar.
They are closer to your domestic house cat in that they can purr, both inhaling and exhaling.
• Known to be typically solitary animals, females raise their cubs alone for about a year before they leave. Male cheetahs sometimes will live in a small group of brothers from the same litter.
• Cheetahs can mate any time of the year with gestation lasting just three months. A litter can range between 2 and 4 cubs.
• Female cheetahs will move their cubs to different hiding places every few days. Once the cubs reach 5 or 6 weeks of age, they will follow their mothers and even start eating from their kills. By the time the cubs reach one year of age, they are hunting on their own. At 15 months, they will move away from their mother and either find a mate or sometimes live in a small group.
• Sumerians trained cheetahs for hunting back in 3000 BC. The Indian (then Hindustan) ruler Emperor Akbar had 1,000 trained cheetahs he used for hunting while in power from 1556 to 1605. Even King Tut’s tomb (1400 BC) contained various cheetah artifacts. It was because of this that historians believed that the cheetah was a sacred animal to ancient Egyptians.
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• The red panda’s adorable appearance steals the spotlight, but there’s more to these tree-dwelling fluff balls than meets the eye. For one, even though they’re known as ‘the lesser panda’ – the red panda isn’t actually related to the giant panda, although they were once thought to be kin.
• To be fair, they’ve also been called ‘fire foxes’ and ‘red cat-bears,’ and they are neither foxes, cats, nor bears!
• Giant pandas and red pandas both live in bamboo forests in Asia.
• DNA analysis shows that the red panda’s closest relatives are raccoons, weasels and skunks.
• Both the red panda and the giant panda possess a “false thumb,” which is an extra bone sticking out of the side of their paw. This gives them a better grip when chewing on bamboo.
• Red panda mothers give birth to litters of up to four cubs, which they keep warm and snug in a hollowed-out tree or rock crevice. The babies are born covered in fur, but their eyes stay closed for the first month of life.
• Although red pandas do have quite a specialized diet of bamboo, they will snack on fruits and blossoms, or any eggs they come across. They will even munch on small rodents or birds now and then.
• Despite their glamorous coats of red and white fur, red pandas camouflage quite well in their habitats, blending in with patches of red moss and white lichen.
The earliest known relatives of the red panda date back about 25 million years. About five million years ago, before the last Ice Age, you might have seen a super-sized version of the red panda (with a similar “false thumb”) measuring roughly the size of a puma.
Red pandas spend most of the day sleeping in high branches, but when the sun starts to set, they get ready to prowl (with a few more naps scattered throughout the night for good measure.)
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