Rolling and wheels in the natural world
David Brin's Uplift Universe includes a kind of wheeled alien called the G'Kek. The G'Kek are described in the 1995 novel Brightness Reef. In the 1996 novel Infinity's Shore, the G'Kek are said to look like "a squid in a wheelchair." They suffer from arthritis in their axles as they become old, especially when living in an environment with high gravity.