Abstract
Most introductory physics courses emphasize highly idealized problems with unique well-defined answers. Though many textbooks complement these problems with estimation problems, few books present anything more than an elementary discussion of scaling. This paper presents some fundamentals of scaling in the zoological domain—a domain complex by any standard, but one also well suited to illustrate the power of very simple physical ideas. We consider the following animal characteristics: skeletal weight, speed of running, height and range of jumping, food consumption, heart rate, lifetime, locomotive efficiency, frequency of wing flapping, and maximum sizes of animals that fly and hover. These relationships are compared to zoological data and everyday experience, and match reasonably well.
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