Explain why all animals, from fleas to humans to elephants, can jump to roughly the same height. The field of science that deals with topics like this is called allometry (Ex. 11.18).

Data from Exercises 11.18

Allometry is the study of biological scaling laws that relate various features of an animal to its size or mass. One example concerns the ratio of the width to the length of leg bones. Explain why the width to the length of a thigh bone in a quadruped might scale as the square root of the stress that it has to support. Compare elephants with cats in this regard. (The density of bone is roughly 1.5 times that of water, and its Young’s modulus is ∼20 GPa.)