To do this, cuttlefish and octopus use papillae, muscly balloon-like skin structures that can expand into various shapes and sizes. Here’s a close-up of a papilla in action: “Something that’s really ...

But as they grow, pigments from food, drinks, and possibly the bacteria or yeast themselves get caught in the papillae, dyeing the tongue a color. Most often that color is black, hence the name.

Larger, dome-shaped vallate papillae sit toward the back of the tongue and, like foliate papillae, can house as many as 250 taste buds each. A fourth type—filiform papillae—is the smallest and ...

When defective desquamation occurs, the filiform papillae that are normally less than 1 mm in length can reach lengths of 12 to 18 mm. And the thick tangle of tongue fibers that forms ends up ...

Surprisingly, they also found that the neural circuit for papillae action is remarkably similar to the neural circuit in squid that controls skin iridescence. Since cuttlefish don’t have tunable ...

A cat's tongue is covered in hundreds of tiny, backward-facing spines called papillae that help to keep the animal clean. Researchers have discovered that papillae are scoop-shaped and hollow ...