Oxford mathematicians reveal secrets of chameleon's 'extreme' tongue…“Special collagenous tissue within the chameleon's tongue is one of the secrets behind its effectiveness. This tissue surrounds a bone at the core of the tongue and is surrounded itself by a muscle.”…
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-b...ians-reveal-secrets-chameleons-extreme-tongueLingual structural pattern of juvenile Chameleon, Chameleo chameleon…
“Finally the authors concluded that the juvenile ages of common chameleon exhibited the characteristic feature of the developing tongue system which is adapted for capturing prey coincides with glandular structure of fore-tongue, pattern of lingual papillae and stem cell contents.”..
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2314808X16301920Functional implications of supercontracting muscle in the chameleon tongue retractors…
“We suggest that the chameleon tongue retractor muscles may have evolved supercontractile properties to enable a substantial force to be produced over a wide range of tongue projection distances”…
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11719528/Evidence for an elastic projection mechanism in the chameleon tongue...
“The release power of the sliding tubular springs exceeds the work rate of the accelerator muscle by at least a factor of 10 because the elastic-energy release occurs much faster than the loading process.”…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691657/The Elastic Secrets of the Chameleon’s Tongue…
“The model involves three distinct coupled subsystems: the energetics of the intralingual sheaths, the mechanics of the activating accelerator muscle and the dynamics of tongue extension”…
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2016.0030