Wildlife Watching Wednesday: The Speedy Western Pronghorn

By: Tom Berg

In the western United States, the fastest land animal is the Pronghorn. They look like antelope, and many people called these animals “pronghorn antelope” and “prairie antelope”, but they are actually not antelope at all. Pronghorns are the lone surviving member of a mammal family from the Pleistocene era called Antilocapridae. All of its related species are now extinct. Surprisingly, the pronghorn's closest living relatives are giraffes and okapi, both of which live in Africa.

Pronghorns have a somewhat unusual brown-and-white coat which helps them blend in with the dry, brown-colored countryside out west. They have a large and distinctive white patch on their rump, and their sides and breast are also marked with white patches. They have a black nose and black around the eyes, and their horns are black, too. The horns are shed and re-grown every year like the antlers on whitetail deer, and males have larger, pronged horns (females have much smaller straight horns).

Pronghorns are herbivores and are well-suited to life in the arid west. They eat a wide variety of plants, including shrubs like sagebrush, forbs and other flowering plants, and many types of grasses. They will also eat different cactus plants and fruits when available. They can even eat plants that are toxic to domestic livestock, such as larkspur, snakeweed, yucca, loco weed and others.

As mentioned above, pronghorns are very speedy mammals. They can run at speeds of up to 55 miles per hour, and the only other land animal on the planet that can run faster is the cheetah in Africa (65-75mph).  In a sustained race, however, the pronghorn will win every time because the cheetah can only run at top speed for a quarter mile. Pronghorns can run at their top speed for a half mile or more.

It is said that the pronghorn evolved its great speed in order to evade predators. Back in the Pleistocene era there were American cheetahs living in the same areas as the pronghorns, and they were likely just as fast as today’s African cheetahs. Luckily for the pronghorns the American cheetahs are now extinct. Today, the pronghorn is much faster than its current predators, which include mountain lions, grizzly bears, wolves and coyotes. That’s good news for the pronghorns!

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