Ancient ancestors evolved to be strong and snappy
Researchers led by the University of Bristol show that the earliest jaws in the fossil record were caught in a trade-off between maximising their strength and their speed.Almost all vertebrates are jawed vertebrates, including humans, first evolving more than 400 million years ago and distinguished by their teeth-bearing jaws. Humans owe their evolutionary success to the evolution of jaws, which allowed animals to process a wider variety of foods.
Comparing the real and theoretical jaw shapes revealed that jaw evolution has been constrained to shapes that have the highest possible speed and strength. Specifically, the earliest jaws in the dataset were extremely optimal, and some groups evolved away from this optimum over time. These results suggest that the evolution of biting was very quick.
"This makes jaws extremely useful to anyone studying the evolution of function. Very different jaws from very different animals can be tested in similar ways. Here we have shown that studies on a large variety of jaws, using theoretical morphology and adaptive landscapes to capture their variety in function, can help shed some light on evolutionary questions."