All posts tagged ‘x-rays’ Hidden Blades, Glowing Scorpions and
Bug Genitalia: Great Science Images From the American Museum of
Natural History New high-speed videos show us what we already
knew: Dogs make a giant mess at the water bowl. But the clips
above and below, filmed in X-ray and visible light, challenge
assertions that canines drink by scooping up fluid with a
backward-curled tongue. Instead, dogs pull up a column of liquid
and chomp it — just like cats do. “It only looks like dogs scoop
with back of their tongue. They drink the same way as cats, just
sloppier,” said evolutionary biologist Alfred Crompton of
Harvard University. Crompton leads a study of dog drinking
published May 25 in the Journal of the Royal Society Biology
Letters. The new work follows research on cat-lapping mechanics
published last fall by a group at MIT. In that study,
researchers deconstructed how cats drink, and suggested dogs
drink differently. “We didn’t use X-ray video like Crompton.
When we saw their clip, we were like, ‘W