Crocs’ bite force depends on body size, not snout shape

New York Times : The species that make up the order Crocodilia feature snouts that range in aspect ratio from the gharials’ long and thin to the alligators’ short and broard. It’s reasonable to expect that after correcting for size, the powerful-looking jaws of an alligator would deliver a stronger bite than the dainty-looking jaws of a gharial. But new research by Greg Erickson of Florida State University and his collaborators has shown that’s not the case. In fact, his experiments on crocodilians reveal a simple linear relationship between the species’ body mass and the force of their bites. Snout shape, it seems, is irrelevant. At 16.5 kilonewtons, the strongest bite belongs to the 1-ton, 6-meter saltwater crocodile of South-East Asia and Northern Australia. In a paper in PloS ONE , Erickson speculates that the linear relationship arose from the crocodilians’ evolutionary success. Once the musculoskeletal architecture for generating high bite forces had evolved, its relative force capacity remained in place, even as new species evolved.