Latest Quadrupedalism Stories

When, how and why modern humans first stood up and walked on two legs is considered to be one of the greatest missing links in our evolutionary history. Scientists have gone to the far ends of the earth – and the wonderful creatures in it - to look for answers to why we walk the way we walk. In the latest such search, researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (South Africa) have taken a closer look at bipedal kangaroos and wallabies and how they move compared...

Scientists have discovered that the reason we swing our arms while we walk can be attributed to our body's natural ability to conserve energy.Scientists have long been puzzled over the reasons why humans swing their arms while walking. But a recent study conducted by researchers in the US and the Netherlands appears to have found that answer.They found that it actually requires 12 percent more metabolic energy to hold arms still rather than swinging them while walking.Researchers from the...

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...

A new study provides support for the hypothesis that walking on two legs, or bipedalism, evolved because it used less energy than quadrupedal knucklewalking. David Raichlen, an assistant professor of anthropology at The University of Arizona, conducted the study with Michael Sockol from the University of California, Davis, who was the lead author of the paper, and Herman Pontzer from Washington University in St. Louis. Raichlen and his colleagues will publish the article, "Chimpanzee...