Why haven't any animals evolved wheels?

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Surely that would be an improvement for speed.

No, it wouldnt. Wheels work well in our flattened and paved world. Wheels totally suck in most natural enviroments. They get stuck, they wear excessive, they limit you to only flat land (No trees, no bumpy enviroments, no swimming, if you flip you're probably dead. Wheels dont work well for nature, they only do for us because we have changed nature so much. Even when wheels first were invented. But you should google that question, sometime ago i have seen a video regarding that topic and it explained it way better then i did now...

Peace
TK

Is there any living thing that can spin 360 degrees continuously? I don't think so is my is my point, seems like bones and the way muscles work would make this impossible. Without that ability a wheel would be difficult to produce.

Wheels? How very unnatural. I'm trying to imagine a real creature with wheels on their paws like one of those toys you pull with a string.

well i can spin my arm around 360° vertically. a wheel with a 45° angeled joint ending at the wheels outside shouldnt be impossible, but if you imagine the world without anything human-made, a wheel doesnt make any sense. To have good grip, they would need to be wide track (ever seen offroad tires?), need heavy duty conneting joints and strong muscles to propel the animal. All adding weight and a higher energy consumption (needs more food to survive). Next thing is, it would have a good speed and more or less flat surface, but flat surfaces are a very rare thing in untouched locations of earth. And even if a animal finds itself in such a rare spot, such an animal wouldnt be agile enough when a predator comes up. Sure it would have an advantage in horizontal speed, but would be completely unprotected when attacked from the side, has disadvantages like turn radius, and would be immobilized by a single broken connecting rod (arm) bone. Even if a species would have evolved wheels, it would have gone extinct pretty fast...

Here is the video i talked about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAGEOKAG0zw

Peace
TK