Songbirds' Throat Muscles, World's Fastest Muscle

Scientist have recently found that the songbirds' throat muscles is the world's fastest muscle. It can move a hundred times faster than the blink of an eye.


"[Pigeons] have really boring, slow songs, and it made me wonder what the muscles in songbirds were like, so I decided to find out."

What Elemans and colleagues discovered is that zebra finches and European starlings can change their tunes at frequencies as high as 250 hertz via direct muscle control.

This means that they are moving their muscles a hundred times faster than a blink of the human eye.