Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Quite a bite

The BBC reports that a team determined that one of the placoderms had a bite of about 80,000 pounds per square inch, and could open its mouth fast enough to suck fish in. The placoderms were those odd ancient fish that had bony armor over their head and "neck" and even tiny shields over their eyeballs (with a small hole to look through). I don't know what they ate, but it must have been able to fight back pretty agressively if they needed that much armor. Maybe the prey flailed spines around--I wouldn't think you'd need that much armor to guard against stinging tentacles.

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