Until recently, prehensile
tails came in 2 basic designs:
the elephant trunk - just
muscles, no bones - and
the monkey tail, in which
muscles flex a series of
bones. But now a us scientist, Kevin Zippel, has discovered a third design in the
tail of a lizard called skink
found on the Solomon
Islands,in the South Pacific
(Science, Vol 26, 5176).
The skink's t(I consists
of a series of cone-shaped
muscles stacked on top of
one another and covered by
a sheath of spirally wound
fibres. This allows the tail to
bend in any direction, and
for one part to stay rigid
while another part flexes.
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