Professor John Hutchin at the Royal Veterinary College and researcher Emily Pringle collected footage of hippos from Flamingo Land in Yorkshire, and analysed various footage of the animals running taken from the internet. Hippos are among the largest land animals there are, weighing up to 2 tonnes, and previous studies suggested the animals were similar to elephants in often using a standard four-footed walk, however, after combing through 169 cycles of locomotion from 32 individual hippos, researchers discovered this was not the case. The analysis of the video footage revealed that the fastest-moving hippos become airborne, sometimes for a substantial period of time - about 15 per cent of the stride cycle. ‘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,’ Professor Hutchin said.

‘It’s hard to work with hippos as they tend to stick to the water, and very seldom are trained to be studied in zoo collections.

‘They’re also very dangerous. That’s part of the reason why science knew little about how hippos move before our research.

‘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!’