“…More recent authors (Kimura, Okada, & Ishida, ; Rollinson & Martin, ; Tomita, ) have advanced just the opposite argument—that primates have unusually big, strong hind limbs; that this produces a caudal shift in the animals' center of mass; that a primate walking with a DC gait therefore tends to pitch backward at the moment of forefoot touchdown (whereas other animals tend to pitch forward); and that the contralateral hindfoot in the diagonal pair is set down earlier to prevent this, thus producing a DS gait. Subsequent studies have not borne out this idea (Cartmill, Cartmill, Schmitt, & Lemelin, ; Druelle, Berthet, & Quintard, ; Vilensky & Larson, ; Young, Patel, & Stevens, ). Prost () argued that the DC‐DS pattern, but not the DC‐LS pattern, “allows an animal to use lateral spine bending to increase distance between successive contact points for the same leg,” thus increasing stride length.…”