A Chameleon Tongue In Slow-Mo Will Show You Just How Badass These Lizards Are

This Will Show You Just How Badass Chameleons Are

Chameleons may be best known for their amazing color-changing ways, but their tongues may be even more amazing. They shoot out at speeds around 13.4 mph and can reach more than 1.5 times the length of the lizards' bodies. And when they reach out to snare fast-moving prey, they can accelerate five times faster than a fighter jet.

If you have trouble imagining what all that looks like, you're in luck. A new video from Earth Unplugged (above) shows the tongue attack of a panther chameleon in glorious slow-motion -- and it's pretty eye-popping.

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"We're looking at one of the fastest tongues on the planet," Sam Hume, an assistant producer at BBC Earth, says in the video. "This is 1500 frames a second, so that's about 60 times slower than real time."

Wild.

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