The lumbering hippopotamus is not exactly the incarnation of agility. Nevertheless, these chonky beasts may surprise you yet. Scientists at the Royal Veterinary College found hippos trot so fast they can become temporarily airborne.

When these creatures reach their top speed, they lift all four feet off the ground up to 15% of the time, very similar to a horse in a gallop. This phenomenon occurs mostly during their high-speed chases to fend off rivals.

These findings are striking, showing that one of the heaviest animals on the planet is surprisingly athletic.

Breaking stereotypes

There’s still a lot we don’t know about hippos — but it’s not exactly scientists’ fault. These huge mammals are incredibly difficult to study up close. The two-ton beasts spend most of their time in the water and, while not exactly nocturnal, they prefer to forage and move about during the night. It doesn’t help one bit that hippos are notoriously aggressive and one of the deadliest land animals. Hippos kill about 500 people each year in Africa.

Luckily, researchers at the Royal Veterinary College got to study two captive hippos at the Flamingo Land in North Yorkshire, England, which are much less dangerous to observe in their paddock than their wild counterparts in Africa.

The researchers analyzed captured footage of the hippos while they moved about. Additional videos from YouTube were also examined frame-by-frame.

“Our study was about as simple as biomechanics research can get. Anyone can take a camera or internet videos and learn something about how animals move from that footage,” led author Prof John Hutchinson said in a statement.

Hippos were thought to walk using a standard quadrupedal (four-footed) gait, in which each foot is lifted off the ground in sequence. However, the team led by Hutchinson found that hippos can trot — a movement that involves diagonally opposite legs moving in synchrony — even when walking slowly or running quickly. In fact, the fast-moving hippos can even become airborne, with all fours off the ground for as much as 0.3 seconds.

In other words, hippos move more like horses rather than elephants, as previously believed.

“We’re thrilled to provide the first study purely focused on revealing how hippos walk and run. We were pleasantly surprised to see how hippos get airborne when they move quickly – it’s really impressive!” said Hutchinson.

The discovery opens new avenues for further investigation. Hutchinson mentioned reports of pygmy hippos, a different species, being able to gallop. This raises questions about the capabilities of baby hippos and whether they share this ability.

“I’m wondering if baby hippos can do something that adult hippos can’t,” he told The Guardian. “That would be pretty neat.”

The findings appeared in the journal PeerJ.