TEETH (with Katie Goldin)

Creature Feature is back for a second season. That's correct, right, Yeah, that's right. Uh. And I'm really excited about this season because we've got UM. Now, I got somehow managed to convince some experts to come on by show and talk about stuff. So that's great. I've got a herpetologist who I have a series of interviews with. UM. I've found a comedian who's also uh, a bio engineer. UM. And

it's just got. It's like I was worried. I was saying, well, how am I I hope I don't run out of content for this season, and I'm as I'm researching, I'm realizing there's no possible way to ever, like all the examples I've been fonding for this season, all the really interesting evolutionary biology stories are even more incredible than last season. So I'm I'm super excited. I think this is shaping up to be really interesting and fun. So season two

is more incredible than season one? Which season is grosser? Oh? You know that's a good question. Um, well, I don't know. I think season two is. It's not well, it's not gross to me. It's it's certainly stranger though, it's weirder. It gets a lot weirder. Uh, there are definitely some gross things. Um. We talked about some you know, why bends that animals have that are kind of like poop based, um, stinky poop bombs. Uh so yeah, there's there's plenty of

grossness to be had. And uh oh and vomit bombs. That's a good one. Animals who explode after eating too much. Uh, there's lots of those actually. Um so yeah, it's if you're I mean, it's I try to keep things. I try to describe things in a way that aren't won't make you lose your lunch. But you know, it is still it's nature doesn't really care about being polite, you know what I mean. So you're trying not to make people vomit. I think that's where you're screwing up. Oh yeah,

that's true. I mean, if we've learned anything from evolutionary biology, throwing up on your enemies as a really good evolutionary strategy. So if you do throw up in response to my podcast, I'm actually helping you along. Well. Yeah, I think in general, like humans have a weird attitude towards vomit, Like if you if you have a cat or all right, I guess a dog to dogs vomit, right, Oh yeah, I don't know. I don't have a dog, but but my

cats certainly vomits. And when when she vomits, like it is just it is a natural, shameless act for her, and uh, and that's how it is for for for for everything, except humans who have all these strange ideas about it and get all worked up over the process. Robert, I forget that you don't know anything about dogs. Wait here, let's do a quiz. True or false, Robert, dogs defensively squirt blood out of their eyes. I know that's not true. That's more of a particular horn to horn toads though, Yeah,

that's the one. Yeah. So wait, what what's your favorite defensive vomiting um. Well, there's a few species of birds who will vomit a sort of orange sticky substance onto a predator and it well, it's actually can be really dangerous for the predator because it can way down their wings. Say it's another avian predator, it'll uh get their wings all oily and make it difficult to fly, and it

can actually cause their downfall. So it's kind of amazing that you can flip the script so much where you have this cute, innocent, little baby bird um that vomits all over it's would be predator, and then that predator is now in mortal danger because it's covered in valm. So you mentioned h animals that kind of explode as well, do you get in you get into termites? Yeah. Termites, Uh, when they get old enough, they kind of concoct this

explosive wine in their bodies. It's not really wine. I just it's funny because it gets the explosive juices get better with age, um and then in order and they once they get old, their mandibles just aren't as good at chopping down plant fibers, and uh, they're kind of they're kind of useless to a certain extent, except that they can use their bodies as a defensive weapon against uh invaders or predators. And so they will violently contract

their abdomens and they'll explode. Uh. So they they it's like the sack of blue liquid that can suicidally explode onto enemies. Um, and it's it's just like it's so they blew themselves. Well, how about the defensive pooping You mentioned that too, right, Yeah, Pygmy sperm whales are a good example. They it's not really poop, it's like this butt syrup. It's the specialized fluid that's this kind of brown, dark,

uh smelly. I would imagine very smelly fluid that they use kind of like squid inc where they will it clouds the water, makes it unpalatable for predators and then also just like gives them sort of a poopy smoke screen. I don't think this one. It's a new one on me. Yeah. And then also, um, some songbirds will say a raven

is trying to eat their young. Uh, the songbirds will poop on the ravens, dive bomb them, and uh it's similar to the defensive vomiting where it will coat the ravens feathers and make it difficult to fly, and it can actually cause them to die because if they can't fly or escape or you know, it's it's a very dangerous situation for the predator. I've never thought about that

with birds before, but it totally makes sense. Like when you see, uh, some of the tragic casualties of oil spills, you know, with that affecting birds, you know that it soaks into their feathers and makes them unable to to fly. But yeah, when I guess when you are a flying organism, there are some real downsides to taking on additional weight or anything that would screw up the aerodynamic properties of

your feathers. Yeah, or altars the chemical composition of the outside of the feathers and makes them permeable to water. And uh, it's a very they're they're very um specialized in terms of how they protect the they bird's body and allow them to fly, so they're quite easy to mess with in a way. So it's very dangerous for these ravens to tangle with the with these dive bomber birds. But Katie did you have any other like topics from season two that you wanted to talk about. Yeah, so

there's a lot of cool episodes. One of the most recent is on tool use. I think a lot of people think of tools as a primarily primate and human thing, but as we'll discover, a lot of other animals have really creative and bizarre ways they use tools. Uh. There's one on superhero powers that's a really fun one, UM David and Goliath, where we talk about the underdog and how they often went out in the natural world and how they managed to do that. And you can check

all this out on our website, Creature Feature pod dot com. Excellent, go do that. If you haven't stuff to blow your mind listeners, why haven't you checked out Creature Feature yet? If you haven't, go go go Now. All right, well, and I know we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we're gonna talk with Katie about teeth. We're gonna spend most of the rest of this episode talking about some uh peculiar and and maybe at times

um intimidating uh chompers in the animal world. Thank thank thank Alright, we're back. So Katie, we asked you to talk with us about teeth today, maybe to have like I realized after I said it, uh, that we should do like a like an awards show for nature's weirdest or most jacked up teeth. But I think that idea came without me realizing it from Your Worst at Sex Awards episode on Creature Feature, which I listened to and I thought was very funny. Um. But yeah, so I thought, maybe, yeah,

we we do a little teeth awards show. And I know this was on my mind because Robert and I just recently did an episode of our other podcast, Invention, about chewing gum, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about chewing ever since then, which is one of those things that you know, like when you're chewing food, if you don't think about it, it tastes really good. It feels really good, but if you do think about

it while you're doing it, it becomes disgusting. With like candy and chewing gum or any candy where you you suck on it or chew on it, you're swallowing flavored saliva, and that's what you're eating when you think about it. And ever since, I realized that it's made eating candy or chewing gum a lot more difficult. Yeah, it's like

a spit treats. Yeah. Um. So you know, one of the interesting things about the human mouth, though, is that I think we don't often recognize how much the human how much human teeth are reflective of our evolutionary niche is omnivores. You know that we have like these these sort of like cutting front teeth, and we have these sort of like slightly reduced canines that you might see in other predators. But then we've also got the grinding molars for plant matter. We have teeth that show the

fact that we eat all kinds of different foods. But there are some animals that you you look at their teeth and you just realize they have a much more specialized way of life. Yeah. I mean one of my favorite kinds of animal teeth are beaver teeth. Is it okay if I talk about that, let go for it. Um. Yeah, they I mean I think they're when you think of teeth, that's kind of the primary animal they have that comes

up in your head. They have those big buck teeth and they chew down trees and but what's cool is there's so much more to it than just on the surface. Like, it's not just that they have these big buck teeth. Um, they're really incredibly special teeth. Um. So first of all, they will grow continuously, so they never stopped growing. And that's because when they chew down would which as as we know, beavers are very industrious there they will terraform

their environment. They're really important, uh in terms of ecological um niche bill ding, and like they also feed on these hard plant fibers and and the inside of the cambium in the tree. It's not true that they like they don't eat the bark. They eat the soft tissue under the tree bark um, and that's full of nutrients. So they need they need really special strong teeth to be able to chow down on these trees and do all of this work. So um, if their teeth didn't

constantly grow, they just get worn down. And as soon as the teeth wore all the way down, they would be unable to function anymore. Uh. So uh, they're also if you ever seen a beaver, I don't know, have you guys seen a beaver? Oh yeah, yeah, but I know what you're about about to to get to because every time I see a beaver in real life, I have to remind myself, Oh, yes, there's this one key coloration difference that is generally not presented in cartoons and

stuffed animals. It's got like got like toxic of in your mouth, doesn't it? Yes, So its teeth look really jankie when if you see one, you may think, oh god, there's something wrong with this beaver because its teeth are bright orange. And now they're perfectly healthy. The orange or the better. Um. So it's orange because the front enamel of their teeth is actually reinforced with iron that they

get naturally in their diets. So um, everyone's enamel enamel is made out of like these tiny nano wire rods that are stacked together, and that's what makes it really hard. Um, and that's what protects your teeth. In beavers, each of these rows are coated in iron, forming these iron nano wires that are especially hard. So that's why they can chew through a tree, whereas if one of us tried to chew through a tree, you know it wouldn't be good news. Wait a minute, wait a minute, so orange

iron teeth. I would imagine, if I'm not wrong, that it's orange because the iron gets oxidized, so the beaver would literally have rusty teeth, right, I mean that checks out to me. I'm not I'm not a chemist, but but I mean I feel like if you want to call beavers like like rusty teeth boys, that wouldn't be so bad. Yeah, but I have I don't think I've ever seen a cartoon beaver or a stuffed animal beaver

actually have orange teeth. I mean, hopefully there's some some more you know, biologically accurate representations out there, but for the most part, again, I'm always just shocked when I see a beaver in real life, and then I have to remind myself that, oh, yeah, this is this is

what they look like. Well, you know, it's It's interesting because there was this TV show on Nickelodeon when I was growing up called Angry Beavers Um, and they actually, in a weird way, they had some of the more accurate representation of beavers because I remember this episod so about how if they didn't shoot their teeth down, they'd keep growing and growing until they would grow into like their brains or something, and that part isn't really true,

but uh, the the part where they their teeth continuously grow is very true, and so that that was interesting. I love cartoons like that because I think that kind of encourages young people's fascination with animals. Oh yeah, I there's I think there's some some better and better um cartoons out there these days. My son watches some of them where they'll they'll manage to balance, you know, anthropomorphic animals that talk to each other with actual realities from

the natural world. Be it's something like octonauts or um oh, what is it? There's a sky, there's a the one of the Puffins Puffin rock U does a pretty good job. Speaking of cartoons, that kind of they called beaver teeth growing continuously just reminds me of the Simpson's Lisa Needs Braces eisodes where they show the age progression her teeth

get more and more. Well, I think that's a that's a British joke there and she show they showed her the Big Book of British Teeth or the one ends up growing through the top of her head in the projection, right, yeah, yeah, it's just like it shows her teeth just getting bigger and bigger until one grows through her skull. Yeah, you're right, that's two different jokes. Yeah the joke. Yeah, yeah, that's why she needs braces so it doesn't stab her brain.

Dental plan. All right, let's keep going on beavers. So what else you got, Katie? Yeah, So the iron in their teeth that makes them that beautiful shade of orange not only predictably it helps them carve through hard plants and woods, but it's also resistant to damage from acid. So beaver's pretty much never get cavities. Um. They're like a dentist's stream teeth um. And which is very important because beaver without his teeth is like, you know, I

don't know, it's just impossible. You can't. We can't beaver without your teeth, right, of course, that's I guess it's true for a lot of animals. So that I mean you you look at the vital role that teeth have in their ability to feed themselves. I mean really for for humans, I mean, we're if not for our cooking technology,

we'd be in largely the same boat. Yeah, I mean, um, I remember there was this survival story of this guy who was he was stuck I think in that a desert somewhere in Australia, like somewhere in the out back where he had gotten lost or something, and he found some kind of abandoned shack and he was he had to stay there because he was miles and miles from civilization and he had to conserve his energy. So he survived by eating like those witchet eat grubs. And then uh,

he started to get a tooth abscess. Uh, and so he realized he had to rip his own tooth out in order to survive, because if the infection spread to other teeth or if he couldn't use his mouth, he would die. So he hold out his own two like did his did dentistry on himself in order to survive, and he I think he did end up Yeah, well, I mean because he was talking about it, So he ended up surviving. The original d seven hours before the h I don't remember the original guy's name, but the

James Franco movie, right right. Yeah, although I feel like pulling out your own tooth is somehow even worse than cutting off your own leg, if that makes sense. Yeah, like you're breaking your job. It's awful. Um. So back

to beavers. Um. They also it's it's really interesting because so the front part of the tooth is that orange color with the reinforced iron, and then the back part is actually a softer made of denton, which is a little it's still hard, but it's softer and it will wear away more quickly than the iron in the front. So when they chew, they actually form these natural wedges with their teeth, and that makes them even better tools.

In fact, beaver jaws were used as tools by early humans, which is a kind of a little bit of a cheating way to have an iron age. You just use a beaver jaw. Um, But yeah, because they were so their their teeth are just such great specialized tools. So it's kind of like a like a single bevel knife, right, the kind of knife that, unlike most is just we're

worn down on one edge. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's Um, it's really utilizing some mechanical advantage and the way it's it's just cool to me that one side is softer, so it'll create a blade basically with these teeth like

little little tiny axes. This whole conversation about how you never see the orange teeth in cartoons has made me think you could do a whole episode, or we could somebody could on like animals that are never depicted in cartoons in anatomically correct ways because to depict them in a comically correctly is disturbing in one way or another. Oh yeah, that's a great idea. I might steal it. I was also going to do UM. Probably this week, I'm going to do a little bit of myth busting

about lions. I advised the Bechdel cast on that, and I probably will mention some things on my show because of the I'm sure the blatant misinformation coming from the new Line King movie that must be corrected. Oh does it present like a phallocentric Lion King? Yeah, I don't know if the new one. I haven't actually seen the new quote unquote live action. It's not live action, it's UM, but I haven't seen it. It's I have seen the old, the old version, which is very inaccurate UM in terms

of how it presents lion society. But you know, speak about speaking of animals that don't do well when their teeth, when stuff happens to their teeth, like a lion with teeth problems can definitely die well. I've I believe I've read that in cases where you have man eaters um with with large feelines like that sometimes occurs due to um uh damage to their their teeth, like they're they're losing their their dental effectiveness and they that's when they

turned to eating humans if they're available. Yeah, that's I think that was the case with the lines of Savo. Is that the ones that were we're eating the people who were um it was this group of like two or three lions who were stalking these people back in the was it in the eighteen hundreds, um, the late

eighteen hundreds. Maybe they were they building a railroad. Yeah, they were building a railroad, I think, and they kept eating these poor workers and um, and they would stock them, they would follow their camps and wait for one of them to let their guard down and eat them. And that's because humans were really we're soft serve basically. Um. So these lions that were weaker and had these dental problems. Um, we're eating people because we were just easier to eat.

Get tired of chewing through a bunch of hide humans. Easy solution, right, We're like little cherry tomatoes on the teeth. All right, Well, let's move on to our next animal. Katie believe you were gonna you're gonna talk about one of our favorites, the corpse whale. Yeah, the the unicorn of the sea, the narwall um. And isn't it I think it's actually true that, like the concept of the unicorn may be related to people who discovered narwhal horns. Yes,

we talked about this. We actually did a two part episode on unicorns, I think sometime last year, or was it even the year before, I don't know, it was sometime recently, and narwhal horns have been hypothesized as one of the things that people sold and traded as unicorn horns. Like basically the two main in roads to unicorns are rhinos and our wall But we were calling them nor whal horns. They're not exactly how horns are they. Yeah,

I'm doing a bit of a goof on y'all. They're actually tusks because they're big old tooth that grows out of their forehead. It's actually an oversized canine tooth. And what's interesting to me is there if you ever, when you think of a norl kind of similar to how you picture of beaver with their pearly white teeth, the nor well, you think of it as a symmetrical unicorn horn like right down the center. It's actually off center because it's usually the upper left canine tooth that is overgrown.

So if you get a top view of an our wall, you can see it actually lists a little bit to the left typically um, and they can grow up to an impressive tin ft long. It's usually only on males. Only about fift of females have a tusk um, and then very very rarely uh, a narwhal can have two

symmetrical tusks, but that's extremely uncommon. Um. And what's really cool about this the narwhal tusk is it is kind of a scientific mystery and there are a few theories on why it exists and has an super weird uh kind of it's it's very odd anatomically, which we can get into um. So one of the most uh. One of the theories is that it's it's just basically am mating a sexual uh dimorphism kind of mating display attributes. So uh, it's this showy thing that maybe helps with mating,

maybe helps male narwhal's kind of face off. Um. And that would make sense because females don't have it. But the weird part about that is that the tusk itself is very specialized. So UM. A lot of researchers argue that the tusk is actually this big sensory organ because it contains millions of nerve endings and it's actually composed not of hard enamel not it's not just this insensitive kind of uh you know, prong, it's the it's composed

of like the sensitive parts of the tooth UM. And so it's thought that maybe it's collecting information about the water. And there's even this theory that, like when you see male narwhal's rubbing their tusks together, that instead of fighting, their sharing sensory information. UM. So one of the proponents

of this theory is Martin Nuila. Uh. He's a Harvard University marine dental expert UM and UH think his research team thinks that this is sharing info about the tusks rubbing together, is sharing info about the salinity and other characteristics of the water that they've traveled through. And so this is this is why they think this may be the case. So the narwhale tusk is very different from

human and even other mammalian teeth. UM. So, I don't know have you guys talked about are you guys going to talk about the anatomical features of the human teeth on the show? Bromin not in today's episode those I'm sure it's come up before. I mean, we know that teeth aren't the same as bones. They've got these different layers of different density and material, right, right, So just

a just a quick refresher. Then it's there's a hard outer layer of an animal um and an inner layer of denton, and then inside of that is the pulp which contains nerve endings and blood vessels. And hopefully you don't really feel that too much. If you do, you might have a cavity. Um uh. And then the root of the tooth is covered in cementum, which is this special calcified substance that contains these little, teeny tiny canals that actually help root the teeth to the alviolar bone

by connecting to what's called the periodontal ligament. Which that's a bunch of words that I barely even know what they mean. So um, it's um. Basically, your teeth isn't just rooted in by sort of those the main pointy roots. It doesn't just sit in the bed it's attached by all these little tiny fibers um that anchor the tooth

to the surrounding tissue into the surrounding bone um. That's why it's not just easy to pop a tooth out um and so, and that's that's a very sin instead of part of the tooth, as you can imagine, because it's it's permeable, it can all these fibers can go through it. In our walls, the entire outside of the tusk is covered in this permeable cementum, so like the stuff that's really basically only in the root of our

teeth is the entire nor wall tusk. And instead of using those little channels, uh, those little holes that are all throughout the cementum to anchor it, they actually seawater traverses through it through passages in the inner layer of denton and into the pulp where it contacts nerve endings,

which sounds yeah, which sounds very unpleasant. So it doesn't it seems intuitively, it seems that there's got to be a reason for this, the fact that seawater can just get in touch with nerve endings, because otherwise that just seems very uncomfortable, right, like, don't you want some holes in your teeth for the ice water to get in? Like, imagine if your tooth had a big old hole in it and then you dove into some super cold water, that would be not not the best feeling. So uh.

The one of the theories that this may be advantageous is that it could be used to detect salinity in the water. And the reason this is important is that high salt concentration can indicate that ice is forming, and narwhals don't want to get trapped in the ice. So if there's a real high salinity, uh, they may know to leave that area because they don't want to get stuck in ice formations. Um. But it's it's really important to note that the science on this has been far

from settled. There's a lot of argument about that if this is an important sensory organ, then why isn't this present in female narwhal's Uh. That seems like kind of a big oversight um. And the fact that a lot of times sexual dimorphism of features like a like a big tuss usually indicates that it's involved in mating displays.

But I do think that there must be It seems like there's likely some utility to the tusks, So I think it could be a kind of rare situation where maybe it was initially used in mating and then the some of the features of it, like these these channels that allow salt water to flow into the nerves could now have some utility that the narwhal's use. So it's it's hard to say. Uh. And I'm really interested to see kind of track that see what researchers come up

with in the future. So kind of like maybe if like a stag's antlers got gained the ability to sense the storm has come in or right, yeah, exactly, all right, we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back more with Katie Golden than all right, we're back. So I have a question, Katie. I have seen images all over the internet, often unlabeled and mem ified, of a creepy looking fish that has human teeth. Do you do you know what that is? Yeah, it's a sheep's

head fish. Uh. And they do have creepy looking human like teeth. Um, that's not it's one of those rare images that's actually not photoshopped, because I've seen all sorts of photoshop things of like, oh, look at this animal with their weird teeth. It's just like, no, you just photoshop some human teeth, because there's like some sort of a cephalopot image that is maybe not photoshop, but just like the way that they the specimen was arranged, it

makes it look like it has human teeth. Well, this tradition goes all the way back to like the tabloid newspapers of the nineteen nineties. I remember when I was a kid, Uh, there was this thing that would be like a cat found with human teeth, and that would be on the cover of the weekly World News and it's super creepy looking. Things that aren't humans shouldn't have human teeth or be able to smile. Yeah, I was always thinking about that. What if my cat could smile?

It would be it would be disturbing. What would a cat have to think in order to smile? It wouldn't be a good thought. But the sheep said, fish here is it's not it's not smiling, to be clear, but does have these very human like teeth. So, I mean the obvious question is what are what are they eating that requires is this these chomp? This is a fish that lives on Snickers bars. Yeah, it's it's it's not only got these human teeth, but it's got lots of them,

just rose and rose of them. Um, and it's. Yeah. They're used to crush up the shells of their prey, so they eat oysters, clams, bivalves, crabs, other crustaceans, you know, so on and so forth, all those oh those crunchy, delightful things you can eat in the ocean. Um, So it can just it just kind of puts it in there like it's going through a blender and crushes them up with all with their many, many human like teeth. Wow, that's well, I've got human like teeth and I can't

crush up oyster shells. Well do you have tons of teeth? You have these guys? I bet this is why I have to steal other people's teeth. I finally found a justification. I think if you shoved a few rows of denters in your mouth, you could crush an oyster. Okay, I'll take that under advisement. Uh so this is one of your honorable mentions, right that it wasn't a main pick for you, But the sheep's had fish. Yeah, I just don't know as much about this fish, but I do.

I think these are ones that I would highly encourage you guys to google. Usually I say, don't google this because it's disgusting, but these are really interesting, So google sheep's head fish. Really cool you see rose and rows of teeth. Another one to definitely google image is the crab eater seal um. And it's, uh, it's this adorable little you know how seals are. They're just these little

chunky balls of cuteness blubberry water dogs. Yeah, they're they're a little they're a little water water boys with like little round bodies and they're very cute, you know. They're they're found uh in an Antarctica um and they are uh. They do eat they are also known as a they're called crab eater seals, but they often eat krill. So, but what's cool about these guys is if you look

at their teeth there, they're so trippy. Um. They have these like whorls and spirals around uh and it looks kind of like, um, almost like a Fibonacci sequence of teeth. It's just like or what are those called, like a fractal fract like like a psychedelic illustration or like a Mandelbrot set edge. Yeah. Yeah, it's like as if you took a tooth, Like if you took a tooth and then just did the like swirl the what's it called the swirl effect and photoshop a bunch of times. Yeah,

they look like, yeah, they look photoshopped. It's like they're really cool. Oh it's a it's also a coke snowflake or a cotch snowflake, however you pronounced that, yeah, kinda. Or it's like if Alex Gray designed a seal skull. I was almost gonna say Alex Gray because I know that was where you were going to get out. Yeah, these are impressive. I'm looking at some of these images right now. Yeah, yeah, these these are amazing. So why

do they have these fractal teeth. Well, it's they look really like they're designed to be these really nasty weapons to just like shred things apart. But I think what they're actually used for is to uh strain smaller prey items like krill out of the water column, so they can get like this big gulp of seawater with some krill and then they sort of force the water out of their mouth and the krill get all caught up in their jankie teeth and then they can eat them,

sort of like the way that whale balein works. It was like a alien jaw spider strainer. Yes, yeah, yeah, like a calendar teeth. Calendar's interesting. And then you have one more in your honorable mention here. Um right, yeah, So this is ah. This is an extinct species of some kind of shark like fish. Um. It lived in the early Permian uh era, like round three million years ago, um and there uh scientific name is the helicoprion um.

And they just have a very very funny looking mouth because it looks like someone shoved a buzz saw on their on their lower jaw. UM. I would definitely google image this. It's also really funny to see the different because we only have fossil records of this, we don't know exactly how this jaw we're like where it fits on the animal. So there's a lot of different interpretations and illustrations of how this shark was put together. Um. There's an drawing where it just super funny. It looks

like this nose. Um, So they put it on the top of the shark where it's just this curly nose of teeth um. And then but I think a lot more the more accepted kind of place to put this buzz saw of teeth is on the lower jaw on the outside, and it really it's just like rows and rows of many many sharp teeth that are just that look like some kind of freaky Tim Burton esque monster. One appears, it appears that it sort of spirals out.

So does it have like new rows of teeth that go down in it, like it gets bigger as it goes along through the spiral? Right? Yeah, I think And you know, I'm not sure that they know exactly because obviously we don't, there's not there's limited record of this shark. But I would guess it's similar to how um modern sharks how they can push out teeth, So when they lose teeth, they just have rows of teeth behind that they push out progressively, and that's how they solve their

dental problems, is they just replace them with new new teeth. Um. So I would imagine that maybe this is a form of that, where you know, it's kind of like a you know what, what's that like that bubble gum that came in those big coils like uh bubble tape, yeah, bubble tape um where you just keep or like a pez dispenser, or you just keep on you're able to keep pushing out new teeth. Um that I I don't know though, It's it's hard to say because this is

a very weird fossil record. Uh. In all of the illustrations I find of it, it's not represented in a way that looks like it could actually bite. So yeah, I'm tempted to think that we have not figured out where the correct anatomical orientation of this yet or exactly how it was just utilized. Yeah, yeah, so it's uh, we don't know. I mean, I certainly don't know why this would be good, Like because if you can imagine just having a buzz soft teeth in your lower jaw,

how hard that would be to chew things. Doesn't seem optimal and maybe that's why they're dead. Um, But there there is the proposal of like how this may have worked is that um, there was like no teeth in the top jaw except the like some crushing teeth, So it's like a mortar and pestle kind of design, so like the bottom thing could crush things up with this like buzz soft teeth, and then the top the top part of the jaw would be like the mortar and the bottom part would be the pestel and just like

grind grind, prey up. But it's all doesn't It just doesn't look like it worked that good, like a like a guillotine mouth, Like it's got a circular guillotine blade and it goes into the like catcher, which is the upper jaw. Yeah, it's one of those things where it looks like a child's idea of a scary monster. So when you're thinking, oh, well, you just put a buzz saw in its mouth and it looks super awesome and cool.

But then when you think about it, there's probably a reason that this shark did not win out in the evolutionary arms race. Yeah, lost to the uh, the recently evolved chainsaw whale. Well, it reminds me remember battle Bots, the TV show a little fighting robots where it was always counterintuitive, like a lot of the ones that seemed like they had the best weapons did not always ruin exactly.

So you have one with big chainsaw on it, You're like, oh, this one's gonna just wreck and then some little wedge shaped one knocks it over and winds. We had a little flippers. There were the ones that excelled. Yeah, it was always the wedges, like our like our friend the beaver. Uh, that wedge shape is just so good. Yeah, it's hard to beat an inclined plane. Now, all right, well, I think that that brings us to the end where we

need to wrap up today. But before we do that, first of all, if you are not subscribed to Creature Feature yet, subscribe to Creature Feature right now. Subscribe to Creature Feature right now, right now. Katie enticed them what what is coming up on Creature Feature? What will have aired recently when this comes out? Yeah, so the episode that's out right now as of this recording is uh one on tool use. Um. I have My guest is

Carmen Angelica. She's a delight and it's it's really fun because we talk about tools of the trade, tools of torture, and tools of love. So it's kind of runs the gamut in terms of what can be used as a tool. Uh, and it's there's some surprising twists and turns are um and Uh. The one I'm recording for next week is going to be on. Animals that you don't think you should be afraid of look pretty innocent and harmless, but

are really actually extremely deadly. Um and I'll probably also be correcting the record on the line, king, Wait a minute, Animals that you don't think you should be afraid of, but you should. Our geese on the list? Is it geese? Hey? Yeah, geese is the whole thing. That's That's the only thing I'm talking about on that episode. Well, they at least deserve a nod. Those things are scary. Yeah, speaking, have you seen like the geese that have teeth? No, I

don't think so. They're not really teeth, they're just deserrated beak. But boy do they look unpleasantrated beak sounds very unpleasant. Okay, Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Katie. It's been so much fun. Yeah for sure. Thanks for having me again anytime, and one last time. Where can people find Creature Feature. Yeah, so, you can find us on our website Creature feature pod dot com. We're on Twitter Creature

feet Pod, and on Instagram Creature Feature Pod. Uh and of course we're on Apple, Apple iTunes, We're on the I Heart Radio app or pretty much anywhere. You get your podcasts anywhere, folks, there's no excuse, no excuse. All right, Well, thanks so much and we'll maybe we'll talk to you again soon, yeah, I hope so. All right, And if you want to check out more Stuff to Blow your Mind, we have a website, Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

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