MicroFactzzz#0059 · 🐙 Animal Chaos
An owl can turn its head 270 degrees and not have a stroke
A special arrangement of blood vessels and neck vertebrae lets owls rotate their heads nearly three times further than a human can, without cutting off blood flow to the brain.
Owls can't move their eyeballs within their sockets the way humans can — so to look around, they have to turn their entire head, and far further than any mammal manages.
An owl can rotate its head about 270 degrees in one direction — nearly three-quarters of a full circle — while in a human, turning the head more than about 90 degrees usually ends in pain or injury.
In most animals, a neck twist that extreme would cut off blood flow to the brain and risk a stroke, but owls have specially enlarged blood vessels at the base of the skull that store blood and compensate for the momentary pinching of arteries during the turn.
On top of that, an owl's neck vertebrae are connected in a way that allows rotation without twisting or squeezing the spinal cord — the whole system is a finely tuned adaptation for a predator that needs to see everything around it while barely moving its body.
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- General knowledge / encyclopedic sources
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Krulicza Nora
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