Chameleons don't just have weird eyes, they have a full-blown biological surveillance system in their skulls. Instead of simple straight wiring, each eye is hooked up to the brain with an optic nerve coiled like a tiny telephone cord, giving their gaze an almost 360-degree range without snapping delicate tissue in the process.⁠ ⁠ Those coils act as built-in slack, and when a chameleon’s eye swings around to track prey or scan for danger, the optic nerve can unfurl and refold, keeping signals flowing while the eyeball swings wildly in its socket. Old-school dissections kept ruining or shifting these fragile nerves, so generations of anatomists missed the twist, literally, until CT scanning let scientists look inside without cutting anything open.⁠ ⁠ By scanning more than 30 reptiles, researchers found the same coiled design in multiple chameleon species, from tiny leaf chameleons to big veiled chameleons, but not in other lizards or snakes. Embryo scans added another layer, showing that...