Hippos can fly. More or less. This is the conclusion reached by a study by the Royal Veterinary College (RVC), in the United Kingdom. The experts examined videos of 169 movement cycles from 32 specimens and observed that for 15% of the time the animalswhich can weigh up to 2 tons, they perform movements by lifting all four legs off the ground.
John Hutchinson, the study’s lead author and professor of evolutionary biomechanics at RVC, told CNN that so far, very little information has been learned about the movements that hippos, which spend most of their time in the water, make on land. “Hippos were a big missing piece of the puzzle. Studying them is very complex,” he said. “They are very aggressive and dangerous.”
Video analysis allows us to state that Hippos, as you might expect, move with particular speed when chasing a specimen younger or when fleeing from lions and rhinos. The study found that the huge animals move at high speed ‘at the trot’, with synchronized movements of the legs in diagonal pairs: front right and back left, front left and back right. “Hippos are among the very few 4-legged animals that do nothing but trot.”
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