Record breaking animals

Common Dolphin: fastest swimmer

The highly sociable and energetic short-beaked common dolphin, (the fastest dolphin species and marine mammal), can reach incredible speeds of up to 60 km/hr¹. By comparison, swimmer Michael Phelps can reportedly swim at about 8 km/hr.

Cheetah: land speed

The  Cheetah can run at speeds of up to 98 km/hr, meaning that it could run 100 metres in just over 3 seconds².  If Usain Bolt and Florence Griffith Joyner were in a 100-metre race against a cheetah, they’d need roughly a 70 metre head start just to tie with the spotted feline at the finish line! 

Peregrine falcon: flying speed

The fastest animal in the world can actually be found here in the UK! Biologists have clocked the peregrine falcon diving at speeds of over 311 km/hr³. This makes the peregrine the fastest animal in the sky during their dive. By the time a peregrine covers 100 metres in their dive, Bolt and Griffith Joyner would have covered around 10 metres in their 100 metre running race. 

However, if we consider that the falcons dive is aided by gravity, the animal with the fastest flight is the Brazilian free-tailed bat, recorded flying at 160 km/hr⁴. 

Savannah elephant: weightlifting

The strongest animal in the world is the Savannah elephant, which is capable of lifting 6,000kg, roughly its body weight from lying down⁵. Even their trunks can lift over 200kg, thanks to over 40,000 muscles bundles. The record for weightlifting was set in 2020 at 265kg for Lasha Talakhadze of Georgia and 180kg for Li Wenwen of China⁶. For Talakhadze, this was equivalent to lifting around 1.6 times his own body weight⁷.

Though elephants may be the strongest in terms of weight, the humble Ant is capable of lifting objects many times its bodyweight, and in 2010, an Asian weaver ant was recorded lifting an object 100 times heavier than its own body². 

Emperor penguin: diving

The greatest dive depth accurately measured for any bird is 564 metres by an emperor penguin off eastern Antarctica⁸. That’s the equivalent of nearly 2 x the height of the Shard, Europe’s tallest building⁹. And the longest recorded dive was nearly 32 minutes.  

In freediving, by comparison the deepest no-limit freedive by a woman is 160 metres, by Tanya Streeter (USA) in the Turks and Caicos Islands on 17 August 2002¹⁰. At the time of setting, this was the deepest official no-limit mark achieved by any diver, male or female. The deepest no-limit freedive (male) is 253 metres and was achieved by Herbert Nitsch (Austria), in Santorini, Greece¹¹. Still, this doesn't come close to the Emperor penguin. 

Puma: high jump

The highest jump on record for any mammal was recorded for a puma (aka cougar or mountain lion), which jumped 7 metres straight up from a standstill (the equivalent of leaping nearly 7 times their own body height!). Moreover, one Puma has been recorded leaping 3.6 metres from the ground into the fork of a tree while carrying the carcass of a deer in its mouth¹² 

In comparison, the world records for High Jump set in 1965 by Cuba’s Javier Sotomayor with a jump of 2.45 metres (men), and in 2024 by Ukraine’s Yaroslava Mahuchikh with a jump of 2.10 metres (women).  

Snow leopard: long jump

The Snow Leopard Trust suggests they can jump up to 10 metres long in a single leap, that's roughly the length of a London bus¹³. The human long jump world records are currently held by Mike Powell of the US, set in 1991 with a leap of 8.95 metres, and Galina Chistyakova who leapt 7.52 metres in 1988.  

Grey Whale: Endurance

The eastern North Pacific grey whale population travels nearly 20,000km in a round trip between summer feeding grounds in the Arctic and the warmer waters of Mexico to rear their calves. An eastern grey whale set a record in 2015 for the longest recorded migration by a mammal - a journey of nearly 22,500km from Russian waters to Mexico and back¹⁴. 

Lions have been recorded swimming 200 metres. But Jacob – a 10-year-old lion whose leg was amputated after getting caught in a poacher’s trap – and his brother Tibu, swam a whopping 1.5km across Uganda’s Kazinga Channel, in what scientists believe is the longest swim ever made by the animal.¹⁵