Get ready to learn about a super neat animal mostly found in Madagascar and the rest of Africa. Many people think the chameleon takes on the color of the surface it touches which is mostly true. But most of their skin's hue changes are a result of physiological reaction that is for communication. The chameleon express itself via it's skin tone reflecting courtship, stress, and competition among others. Holy Spicoli neatness galore!
Chameleons tongues are also super neat! "Stored in the lizard’s throat pouch is a tongue bone surrounded by sheaths of elastic, collagenous tissue inside a tubular accelerator muscle. When the chameleon spies an insect, it protrudes its tongue from its mouth, and the muscle contracts, squeezing the sheaths, which shoot out as if spring-loaded." Here it is in slow-mo https://www.youtube.com/
And finally recent neat research has discovered clues to how chameleons actually change color. Underneath a layer of pigmentary skin cells, the researchers found another layer of skin cells with nanoscale crystals arranged in a triangular lattice. They found that the chameleons can adjust the space between the crystals which affects the color of light that the lattice of crystals reflects. As the distance between the crystals increases, the reflected colors shift from blue to green to yellow to orange to red. How neat is that!
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