Image courtesy of Emma Schachner.

Gotta say, I did not see that coming.

Today sees the publication of a new paper by Emma Schachner and colleagues in Nature, documenting for the first time that unidirectional, flow-through breathing–previously only known in birds and crocodilians–happens in freakin’ monitor lizards. The image above, which is most of Figure 1, pretty much tells the tale.

Some quick background: until the early 1970s, no-one was quite sure how birds breathed. Everyone knew that birds breathe, and that the air sacs had something to do with it, and that the bird lungs are set up as a series of tubes instead of a big array of little sacs, like ours, but the airflow patterns had not been worked out. Then in a series of nifty experiments, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen and his students and colleagues showed that birds have unidirectional airflow through their lungs on both inspiration…