Red kangaroos can reach speed of more than 35 miles an hour, they can also cover an area 25 feet long and get up to 6 feet high in one jump using their tail like a spring to give them more power. When kangaroos want to move slowly, they do kind of lean on their tail, to support their body. When kangaroos are grazing they move their hind pairs of feet together which makes their movement awkward but the power behind them in their tail is keeping them balanced. There was always a question of why Kangaroos are placing their tail on the ground when they are walking slowly.
Most of the researchers believed that the tail is only used for the purpose of balancing. Professor Max Donelan from Simon Fraser University, collaborated with his colleagues Shawn M. O’Connor, Terence J. Dawson, Rodger Kram trained kangaroos to walk on a measuring device called the force plate, what they found was that the tail was doing a lot more than anyone have realized. They Found that kangaroos actually used their tail like a fifth leg when they are hopping around or walking. For this study, they documented the movement of five red kangaroos in Sydney Australia which are the largest species of kangaroo and the biggest marsupial on the planet. They observed that kangaroos when walking first put their forelimbs on the ground and when it is the time for their hind limbs to move forward, they use their tail to accelerate and push the whole body forward and then they put their hind limbs on the ground.
They have published a paper in Biology Letters which presents that the tail exerted as much force as four other legs combined. By measuring the commonly work in physics called the mechanical force, the kangaroos tail is as important when it walks as one of our legs as we walk. They found that the kangaroos’ tails are involved on their movement in three ways. First of all, most of the propulsive force which is needed for the movement is provided by the tail. Furthermore, the previous belief that the tail is needed to balance the body weight have been examined and turned out to be that although the tail plays an important role in the balancing, it only provides the 13% of the vertical force needed to balance the body. Besides, investigating on the mechanical work that the tail applies to the whole body for pushing forward, it demonstrates a substantial role of the tail in performing positive mechanical work.
In simple words, it can be compared with the role of one of human’s leg when walking. You probably are thinking what exactly makes a leg a leg? The answer could be simple, if a leg exists to play a key role in walking, then kangaroo has five legs.
Kangaroos are the only animals that use their tails as a leg, Max Donelan said.
More articles about this topic can be found in Sciencemag, Nytimes, and TheGuardian.
Featured image by Ashish Upadhyay on Unsplash