Why are the world's fastest medium-sized animals?

The scoreboard of the fastest living creatures on the planet is quite diverse. There is a cheetah in the "land sprinter" discipline, a peregrine falcon for the fastest flight, and a marlin, who can easily overtake the multiple Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps in the water. But at the same time, all animals in their series have average sizes: there are cats more (and less) cheetahs, and birds of various parameters, and the fish come across tiny and huge (ask a fisherman friend, he will tell). What is the secret?

It's all about muscles

Logically, the fastest should stand out for their size. Or to be the largest, because they have more muscles. German scientists became interested in this paradox and studied 474 species of living creatures that run, swim and fly all over the planet. The mass of these animals varied from 30 mcg to 100 tons, but the "average ones" were still the fastest.

Assuming that this fact may be related to the basic feature of the physics and biology of living organisms, scientists conducted a series of studies and found that the thing is in the speed with which energy ends in the cells of fast muscle fibers.

Better less, but better.

The resulting model answers all questions regarding the difference in speed depending on the size. It can be applied to the inhabitants of all climatic zones and continents on water, land and in the air. In addition, it describes the distribution of speed among extinct animals, such as dinosaurs.

Indeed, tyrannosaurs with all their formidability and impressive size ran slower than Velociraptors. Using the developed model, scientists suggested that a dinosaur weighing 6 tons would hardly pick up speed above 27 kilometers per hour. So a well-motivated person of medium size could well escape from him.