July 10, 2008

Fast Muscles Help Birds to Sing

Superfast muscles make bird song possible.

"We discovered that the European starling (found throughout Eurasia and North America) and the zebra finch (found in Australia and Indonesia) control their songs with the fastest-contracting muscle type yet described," said Coen Elemans, who conducted the study as a postdoctoral researcher in biology at the University of Utah.

Those are not the only birds with such muscles, just the species in the study.

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