Komodo dragons have iron-tipped teeth, new study shows
Komodo dragons, the world’s largest species of lizard, have iron-tipped teeth that help them to rip their prey apart, according to new research.
The metal is concentrated in the cutting edge and tips of their curved, serrated teeth, staining them orange, scientists wrote in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Komodo dragons are native to Indonesia and weigh around 80 kilograms (176 pounds) on average. They eat almost any kind of meat and are known as deadly predators…
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, OH COOL LIKE SHREWS??? SHREWS ALSO HAVE IRON TIPPED SPEAR TEETH???!!
Weeeell, not spear teeth, but iron tipped, yeah
Part of my job involves dissecting owl pellets to identify what small creatures the owl has been eating (this is a Very Handy method for determining small creature biodiversity on a site because owls are much better at finding them than we are)
Once you have the skulls and jaws, you can ID what the species are, anyway, and one of the early ID features you learn for shrews is their iron-tipped teeth. Except in their case, they have so much iron that their teeth are actually red:
Those are both very pronounced examples, but yeah
Other fun facts:
They aren’t rodents, for all that they look like long-nosed mice; they’re insectivores, like hedgehogs
They are venomous, although nowhere near enough to kill a human (but a bite will get infected)
There are three shrew species in the UK and the pygmy shrew is literally our smallest mammal:
Ah! So actually, that one is an elephant shrew, or sengi – they superficially look a bit shrew-like but are unrelated (more closely related to elephants than shrews, in fact, which just goes to show it would be a funny old world if we were all alike)
So that one is not venomous, and I don’t believe it has iron teeth either
Not all shrews even have iron teeth! White toothed shrews don’t bother. In red toothed shrews, because they’re born with the only teeth they’ll ever have and their metabolism is so fast meaning they have to eat a lot, the iron exists to help their teeth cope with all that extra work without dulling or breaking. So red toothed shrews tend to be capable of moving even further along the edge of metabolism’s knife point than white toothed ones!
ALT
amhrancas 