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About the Cover
Cover: The top panel represents a chameleon capturing a lizard with its tongue. Chameleons have evolved the ability to eat large prey, which places considerable demands on the function of their tongue retractor muscles. The supercontractile properties of the muscle in the tongue retractors allow chameleons to exert large forces over a wide range of shortening, as indicated in the graph (see Herrel, Meyers, Timmermans and Nishikawa, pp. 2167-2173). This trait probably occurred during the evolution of chameleons because their close relatives, the agamids, do not possess supercontractile muscle and, consequently, cannot exert large forces over wide ranges of shortening (bottom panel).
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