This is a list of the fastest animals in the world, by types of animal.

Fastest organism

The fastest land animal is the

cheetah The cheetah (''Acinonyx jubatus'') is a large cat native to Africa and central Iran. It is the fastest land animal, estimated to be capable of running at with the fastest reliably recorded speeds being , and as such has evolved specialized ...

. The

peregrine falcon The peregrine falcon (''Falco peregrinus''), also known as the peregrine, and historically as the duck hawk in North America, is a cosmopolitan bird of prey ( raptor) in the family Falconidae. A large, crow-sized falcon, it has a blue-grey ...

is the fastest bird, and the fastest member of the animal kingdom, with a diving speed of . Among the fastest animals in the sea is the black marlin, with uncertain and conflicting reports of recorded speeds. When drawing comparisons between different classes of animals, an alternative unit is sometimes used for organisms: ''body length per second''. On this basis the 'fastest' organism on earth, relative to its body length, is the Southern Californian mite, '' Paratarsotomus macropalpis'', which has a speed of 322 body lengths per second. The equivalent speed for a human, running as fast as this mite, would be . The speed of the ''P. macropalpis'' is far in excess of the previous record holder, the Australian tiger beetle '' Cicindela eburneola'', which is the fastest insect in the world relative to body size, with a recorded speed of , or 171 body lengths per second. The

, the fastest land mammal, scores at only 16 body lengths per second, while Anna's hummingbird has the highest known length-specific velocity attained by any

vertebrate Vertebrates () comprise all animal taxon, taxa within the subphylum Vertebrata () (chordates with vertebral column, backbones), including all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. Vertebrates represent the overwhelming majority of the ...

. owever 'body length per second' is a theoretically dubious unit which cannot be justified by engineering/physics dimensional analysis, it implies for example that a 2m long shark should be able to swim 10 times as fast as it could when it was a 20 cm long juvenile, and that a large bird three times as long as a small bird of similar type and shape ought be able to fly three times faster than the small bird, neither being what hydrodynamic/aerodynamic analysis would predict or what happens in nature].

Invertebrates

Fish

Due to physical constraints, fish may be incapable of exceeding swim speeds of 36 km/h (22 mph). Larger reported figures are therefore highly questionable.

Amphibians

Reptiles

Birds

Mammals

Notes

References

{{Reflist, 32em Lists of animals

Fastest Fastest is a model-based testing tool that works with specifications written in the Z notation. The tool implements the Test Template Framework (TTF) proposed by Phil Stocks and David Carrington in . Usage Fastest presents a command-line user ...

Biological records