Holocene park, the bug jawed by Dragonthunders on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

Visualize in flesh and alive terrestrial mammals such as elephants, horses or rodents and how they used their heads is a surreal image, however among the marine substrates were found much more aberrant creatures, in particular the whales, which have no morphological precedent similar in its lineage or some other of the vertebrate group of the earth. Although on the one side there were dolphins, killer whales, sperm whales with skulls that resembled several terrestrial mammals in morphology, there was this other group, the long jawed whales with wide and extremely thin lower jaws that were once wrongly considered as ribs, and the upper part depending on the species they formed a rare type of almost flat cover or arch shaped.

It has been a long time to try to figure out how such jaws worked, specifically how they were structured since none of the actual remains preserved with the whole original animal shape. The most accepted theory over why they obtained such

shape in some species was the use of grappling structures, a kind of mouthparts such as those of an insect that give them the nickname of "Bug Jawed", with the upper arch covered with hard filaments like nails that together could cause substantial damage in large preys, this based on some well preserved upper jaw. Unfortunately, and despite the large number of remnants found, none has been found intact as how the animal died, so the idea that such structures functioned as mouthparts seems to be the most plausible...