Big fish with big bite reported on BBC News, 29 November 2006. Scientists in Chicago have built a biomechanical model of the skull and jaws of an extinct fish named Dunkleosteus terrelli to see how fast and powerful its bite was. They found a “highly kinetic skull driven by a unique four-bar linkage mechanism.” This enabled the fish to open its mouth very rapidly and create a suction force that dragged prey into its mouth, and then bring its jaws together with the force around 5,000 Newtons. This is the strongest bite of any known fish, including the great white shark. It is unusual for a fish to have both a fast bite and powerful bite – they usually have one or the other. One of the researchers, Mark Westneat of the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, explained: “This is possibly due to the unique engineering design of its skull and different muscles used for opening and closing.” The fish was a placoderm, an extinct group of fishes that had bony plates in the skin, and which grew to be about 10m (33ft) long. Scientists believe it needed a powerful bite because it “was surrounded by possible prey that all required really high bite force.”
Editorial Comment: “Unique engineering design” is actually evidence for Design and hence Designer. It is anything but evidence for chance random processes. The fact that this fish, and all placoderms, are extinct, and that very few fish today ever grow to be 10 metres long, is evidence that the living world is going down in both diversity and size. This is the opposite of evolution. In fact, this fossil is good evidence for the Biblical history of the world, i.e. a created world, full of “uniquely designed” complex creatures that have degenerated or died out. (Ref. jaws, bio-engineering, biomechanics)
17th May 2007