The limbs of therians are no longer sprawled during locomotion but rotate around their proximal pivots in a plane parallel to the direction of forward progression.Whole-body mechanics are highly adapted and provide dynamic stability even when the animals are running on discontinuous substrates. Furthermore, limb mechanics rely to a large extent on self-stabilizing mechanisms to minimize the effort of central neural control (Fischer and Blickhan, 2006; Blickhan et al., 2007;Biknevicius et al., 2013).