(Credit: Javier Lazaro) Creating shrunken heads—small, severed human heads that are widely associated with Voodoo and tribal rituals—is a gruesome process, apparently much more than what’s shown in Beetlejuice. But leave it to the animal kingdom to prove there’s a natural, less sinister way to shrink a head. Red-toothed shrews’ heads seasonally reverse sizes once they're adults, something called the Dehnel phenomenon, which was first discovered in 1949. We now have more information on how much a shrew's skull actually changes thanks to a new research report published Monday at Current Biology. This report is the first to fully document the changes by following individual shrews throughout seasonal changes. Researchers found shrew skulls shrink up to 20 percent from summer to winter, according to the study. Studying these alterations could help us understand how some complex degenerative processes could be reversed. https://youtu.be/mfNErmpwErw?t=1m19s
A group of scientists captured 12 shrews and ...
