Bigger chameleons may look more striking, with their changing colours, swivelling eyes and long, elastic tongues (which are often their body length) - but their smaller cousins take the prize for tongue-strike speed.
Though its body is only about 5cm long, the little rosette-nosed pygmy chameleon from Tanzania has one of the fastest tongues.
- It has very strange feet, can change colour, has amazing panoramic vision and a very long tongue. Meet one of the world's weirdest animals
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That organ is 2.5 times its body length, all sticky and coiled like a spring ready to catapult out, accelerating faster than a sports car - reaching nearly 100km/h in only one-hundredth of a second.
This chameleon rarely misses its target, ambushing prey at a distance while hiding patiently, camouflaged among shrubs. Rapidly recoiling elastic muscle tissue enhances the tongue's speed; the tip is covered in thick, sticky slime and sports a suction pad to firmly hold insect prey while it is swiftly drawn back into the reptile's mouth.
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Main image: © John Lyakurwa, some rights reserved (CC BY), CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
