Top speeds of carnivorans?

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After years, I think I have finally found a paper with a reliable measurement of brown bear speed. Sundell et al. (2006)-> use GPS collars to track bears and their movement, and this is what they said regarding movement speed of the animals. The sad thing is that this paper has been out for literally over a decade, so what I've been seeking has existed for all the time I've been interested in this subject.

The behavior of the bear varied greatly among the experiments, but 3 common modes of behavior and their combinations were evident: hiding (i.e., not moving), escaping, and approaching people or their tracks. We observed hiding in 11 of the 12 experiments, and it was usually associated with escape (hiding before or after the escape). We observed this behavior in 9 experiments. In 3 experiments, the bear approached people or their tracks. These 3 cases also involved the bear hiding and escaping. In the cases where the bear only hid, it was passed at the distances of 44, 72, 76, and 110 m. The escape distances varied from 37 to 624 m (mean 212 m 673 SE). The escape speed, if any, varied from less than 1–31 km/hr. The escape usually started with slow motion, and the speed increased with distance from the people. All the results are based solely on observations obtained with the GPS–GSM collar. We did not see or hear the bear during any of the experiments.

Which is...actually about what I expected. Although I can't rule out the possibility that this is not a maximal speed, the fact that the speed with which these bears escaped exhibits vast variation, and the fact that brown bears are already cantering (which could be considered a slow gallop) at speeds of ~3 m/s (Shine et al., 2017->), makes me think that it's very close to top speed, if not it.

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Compared with the canids, F. rufus is a rather slow runner, reaching a maximum speed of about 24 kilometers per hour (15 mi./hr.).

Guide to the Mammals of Pennsylvania

Note that this book was published in 1987, which is why it uses the synonym Felis rufus for the bobcat (now called Lynx rufus). Its speed estimate makes sense to me for a comparatively small animal (smaller house cats are popularly claimed to run at speeds of ~30 mph; I seriously doubt that's accurate considering how they are, again, comparatively small animals). So far it's the best I could find from published literature for small cat speed.

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Overall average chase speed, as measured by chase distance divided by chase duration, was similar between species (2.7 ± 0.8 m s⁻¹ and 2.3 ± 1.09ms⁻¹ for hounds and pumas, respectively; t(6) = − 0.31, p = 0.77, Table 2). However, GPS-derived average speeds from all hounds (including those not outfitted with accelerometers) and pumas suggested that, across chases, hound pursuit speed was twice that of the escaping pumas (1.7 vs. 0.74ms⁻¹ for hounds and pumas, respectively; t(1870) = − 10.4, p < 0.01; Table 3, Fig. 2), since pumas spent larger proportions of each encounter stationary (avg. 31% vs. 15% stationary for pumas and hounds, respectively; t(6) = 1.37, p = 0.22). Using accelerometer-derived speed estimates (Eqs. (3) and (4)) to resolve running dynamics in finer temporal resolution, we note that pumas briefly hit peak speeds in excess of 14ms⁻¹, more than twice the top speed of the pursuing hounds (5.2–6.3ms⁻¹, Table 3). Puma escapes were characterized by sequential high-speed evasive maneuvers interspersed with slow, low acceleration periods (Fig. 3). In contrast, hound pursuit speeds were more constant over the course of each chase (Fig. 1C and Figs. S2–S4C).

peerj.com/articles/3701/?utm_source=TrendMD&utm_campaign=PeerJ_TrendMD_0&utm_medium=TrendMD