Gazelles can burst near one hundred kilometres an hour
These small antelopes of Gazella, Eudorcas, and Nanger live mostly across African deserts, grasslands, and savannas, with ranges into southwest and central Asia and India. Some sprint in bursts near one hundred kilometres an hour, or hold about fifty for longer runs.
Most stand sixty to one hundred ten centimetres at the shoulder and wear fawn coats. Taxonomy stays messy: Gazella is widely treated as holding about ten living species, one already gone—the Queen of Sheba's gazelle—and most survivors face some level of threat. Closely allied forms include Asian Procapra gazelles, the blackbuck, and Africa's springbok. Fossils of Gazella stretch through Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene beds of Eurasia and Africa, with the earliest African members around fourteen million years ago.
Thomson's gazelle, the familiar African tommie, stands roughly sixty to seventy centimetres high, brown and white with a bold black stripe, and males carry long, often curved horns. When cheetahs, lions, or other hunters close in, tommies stot—bounding high before fleeing. The English word arrived around sixteen hundred via French and Old Spanish from a Maghrebi pronunciation of Arabic gazal; Arabs long hunted the animal, then cast it as a symbol of human beauty in literature.
Linguists even link Arabic ghazal, love poetry, to the animal's name. Caliph Abd al-Malik, who lived from six hundred forty-six to seven hundred five, freed a captive gazelle because she reminded him of his beloved. African families such as the Joof of Senegambia and the Eraraka of Uganda treat the gazelle as a totem and forbid killing or touching it. Grace on the page and speed on the plain are two sides of the same creature.
Source: Gazelle
