Well-adapted crocodiles

The Dinosaur mailing list (Dinosaur@USC.EDU) reports that at the next meeting of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology,

“Greg Erickson and others will assess bite force parameters and output in crocodylians, and show that despite jaw variation, tooth variation, fossil and extant Crocodylia have shown little change in bite force capacity, and this is apparently consistent between *Alligator* and *Crocodilus* even during ontogeny. The bone crushing bites are apparently quite ancient.”

–this is exactly what one would expect from the fact that crocs have been so well-adapted over the eons, isn’t it? One would also expect little change in performance parameters associated with, say, cockroaches …

– what would be interesting to look at is whether there has been any improvement in crocs’ sensing capabilities and neurological hardware … The jaws are near-perfect weapons “hardware” but it might be just as impressive that the same basic “detection & attack” software has worked so reliably for hundreds of millions of years … That’s quite a bit better than we are able to do with our software, human or computer-based!

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