PROVIDENCE — A panel convened by this newspaper to compare running forms adjourned without a finding, after each of its five members demonstrated a method incompatible with the other four.

The panel was seated on the gravel path at Blackstone Boulevard shortly after six. The Gazette had asked one question: how should a body run? It received five answers, each with a demonstration, and no second.

The velociraptor went first and asked that the record reflect its size. It stands about half a meter at the hip and weighs about what a large turkey weighs, and it wished to address its public image directly: the animal familiar from film was modeled on a cousin, Deinonychus, and scaled up. The velociraptor had feathers, and said that quill knobs on a forearm bone recovered in Mongolia settle the matter. On form: it runs on two toes per foot, the third and fourth, holding the second — the sickle claw — clear of the ground. Its tail is stiffened by rods of bone along the vertebrae and swings as a counterweight through turns. Asked its top speed, the velociraptor said estimates exist and none were made by anyone who saw it.

The kangaroo declined to call what it does running. It hops, and above a walk the cost of hopping barely changes with speed: the tendons in its legs store and return energy on every landing, so going faster is nearly free at every speed anyone has measured. It cannot move its hind legs independently on land — a point it raised before the ostrich could — though it can in water. At walking pace it uses its tail as a fifth leg, and the tail does as much of the pushing as the four legs together. The kangaroo said it had never understood the panel's interest in cadence.

The wolf's position was that form is a question of how far, not how fast. It trots at about nine kilometers an hour for most of a day, on its toes, narrow through the chest, its feet landing on a single line so that the hind foot drops into the print the front foot just left. It can reach the mid-fifties for a short distance and does not consider that running. Thirty kilometers in a day is routine.

The mountain goat objected to the venue. It is not a goat — it is a goat-antelope, a relative of the chamois — and it runs on rock, on hooves with a hard outer rim around a soft pad that grips like a rubber sole. It climbs slopes steeper than sixty degrees and clears three and a half meters in a single jump. The panel's flat gravel path, it said, was not running; it was walking with extra steps. Reminded that the highest point in Rhode Island is Jerimoth Hill, at 812 feet, the goat asked whether that was a joke and was told it was not.

The ostrich spoke last and briefly. It is the only bird with two toes. It holds about fifty-five kilometers an hour for half an hour, touches seventy in bursts, and covers more than four meters in a stride. Treadmill studies in Western Australia found it runs at about half the metabolic cost of a human at the same speed, most of the difference explained by tendons doing the work that in a person the muscles do. It uses its wings to steer and to brake. Asked about the velociraptor's feathers, the ostrich said it was glad someone had brought it up.

The panel was asked to vote. Each member voted for itself. The Gazette thanked the participants. The wolf was asked, on the way out, whether it was leashed.