Pythons are famous for swallowing enormous meals whole—including morsels bigger than their own body mass. | To digest large, infrequent feasts, a python's heart works overtime by increasing ...

In a paper in the current issue of Science, they report that a gorging python expands its heart by enlarging existing cells - a process called hypertrophy - and not by creating new ones.

Biologists discover the Burmese python can expand the size of its heart to cope with extra metabolic demands of eating big meal.

The many such figures in The Shape of the Heart that beautifully display prehistoric to modern representations of the human heart are the book's most entrancing features.