Saturday, January 31, 2009

How Does A Dog Walk? Surprisingly, Many Of Us Don't Really Know

How do dogs walk? It turns out that all four-legged animals step with their left hind leg followed by their left foreleg. Then they step with their right hind leg followed by the right foreleg, and so on. Animals differ from one another only in the timing of that stepping. (Credit: iStockphoto/Tim McCaig)

From Science Daily:


ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2009) — Despite the fact that most of us see our four-legged friends walking around every day, most of us-including many experts in natural history museums and illustrators for veterinary anatomy text books-apparently still don't know how they do it.

A new study published in the January 27th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, shows that anatomists, taxidermists, and toy designers get the walking gait of horses and other quadruped animals wrong about half the time. That's despite the fact that their correct walking behavior was described and published more than 120 years ago.

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