The Three Grades

Although there are always outliers, i.e. some extremely fast digitigrade animals, – like the cheetah–, or some relatively slow unguligrade animals, – like the pig–, it’s still helpful to know that the leg/foot anatomy of an animal, – and thus its locomotion –, generally correlates with its speed. So we’ll have, in the overly simplified way: plantigrades have low speed, digitigrades have medium speed, and unguligrades have high speed.