Drive almost any Wyoming highway and you will see them: tan and white figures dotting the sagebrush, watching the traffic with dark, alert eyes. The pronghorn, often called antelope though it belongs to a family all its own, is among the most abundant and remarkable animals in the state.

The pronghorn is the fastest land animal in North America, capable of sustained sprints approaching sixty miles an hour. Biologists believe this astonishing speed evolved to outrun the American cheetah, a predator that vanished thousands of years ago, leaving the pronghorn built to escape a ghost. Nothing alive today can catch it in a fair race.

Wyoming holds one of the largest pronghorn populations on Earth, and the animals are woven into the fabric of the state. They undertake long seasonal migrations between summer and winter range, journeys increasingly threatened by fences, roads, and development that block their ancient routes.

Efforts to protect those migration corridors, including wildlife crossings over busy highways, have become an important conservation cause. The pronghorn endures as a quintessential Wyoming animal, superbly adapted to the open plains, breathtakingly fast, and so common that residents sometimes forget how extraordinary the creature grazing beside the road truly is.