This paper describes the formulation and experimental testing of a novel method for the estimation and approximation of submanifold models of animal motion. It is assumed that the animal motion is supported on a configuration manifold $Q$ that is a smooth, connected, regularly embedded Riemannian submanifold of Euclidean space $X\approx \mathbb{R}^d$ for some $d>0$, and that the manifold $Q$ is homeomorphic to a known smooth, Riemannian manifold $S$. Estimation of the manifold is achieved by finding an unknown mapping $γ:S\rightarrow Q\subset X$ that maps the manifold $S$ into $Q$. The overall problem is cast as a distribution-free learning problem over the manifold of measurements $\mathbb{Z}=S\times X$. That is, it is assumed that experiments generate a finite sets $\{(s_i,x_i)\}_{i=1}^m\subset \mathbb{Z}^m$ of samples that are generated according to an unknown probability density $μ$ on $\mathbb{Z}$. This paper derives approximations $γ_{n,m}$ of $γ$ that are based on the $m$ samples and are contained in an $N(n)$ dimensional space of approximants. The paper defines sufficient conditions that shows that the rates of convergence in $L^2_μ(S)$ correspond to those known for classical distribution-free learning theory over Euclidean space. Specifically, the paper derives sufficient conditions that guarantee rates of convergence that have the form $$\mathbb{E} \left (\|γ_μ^j-γ_{n,m}^j\|_{L^2_μ(S)}^2\right )\leq C_1 N(n)^{-r} + C_2 \frac{N(n)\log(N(n))}{m}$$for constants $C_1,C_2$ with $γ_μ:=\{γ^1_μ,\ldots,γ^d_μ\}$ the regressor function $γ_μ:S\rightarrow Q\subset X$ and $γ_{n,m}:=\{γ^1_{n,j},\ldots,γ^d_{n,m}\}$.