Fancy Feet Wild Cheetahs Excel at Acceleration

"Nature documentaries always go on and on about how fast a cheetah can run. Cats in captivity have been clocked at 65 miles an hour, the highest speed recorded for any land animal."

"And yet, scientists know very little about how the animal runs in the wild, especially when on the hunt."

"'You can look at it and say, 'Oh that's fast,' , says Alan Wilson, a veterinarian at the Royal Veterinary College, London. 'But you can't actually describe what route it follows, or how quickly it's gone, or the details of [the] forces it has to exert to do that.'"

"Wilson and his colleagues were curious to know more, so they tracked a group of wild cheetahs in the Okavango Delta in Northern Botswana, using a sophisticated radio collar they had designed."