In 1850 there were 60 million antelope in North America, but they were nearly wiped out along with the Buffalo. There are about a million left today.
Scientists studying prong-horned antelope still know very little about these animals.
What IS known is that the rate they metabolize oxygen at is three and a half times higher than even the most fit human runner.
The pronghorns are the best endurance athletes in the world, according to Stan Lindstedt, a biologist from Arizona. They can maintain a speed of 40 miles an hour for more than an hour!
What is probably the most amazing known fact about these antelope is that they have 10X vision. This means that, on a clear night, these mammals can probably see the rings of Saturn!
Their hearts and lungs are three times bigger than that of other mammals of the same weight. They also have twice as much blood circulating through their bodies, and these animals have no body fat whatsoever.
The only humans believed to have ever managed to exhaust these deer through tracking and ‘chasing’ them were the Tarahumara Indians who would persist until “the creature falls from exhaustion."
This was, however, never witnessed by the person who wrote this account in 1935.
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