Scientists at the University of South Florida have identified a shared, high-speed tongue-launching mechanism in salamanders and chameleons that could inform future medical and industrial tools. The work, led by USF postdoctoral researcher Yu Zeng and integrative biology professor Stephen Deban, sets out a unifying model for how these distant animals achieve their lightning-fast strikes.

The team’s video analyses, compiled over more than a decade in the Deban Laboratory, show both groups can project their tongues at speeds of up to 16 feet per second. Zeng and Deban say the same “ballistic” architecture, built from ordinary tissues, tendons, and bone, defines both systems and may be readily translated into engineered devices.