One of my favorite television shows, which has sadly been cancelled after its current season, is Bones. I am absolutely intrigued with Forensic Anthropology and have always had an odd fascination with collecting animal bones, which brings me to talk about the mandible for today’s stream of consciousness prompt ‘man’.
The mandible or lower jaw is one of the strongest and only movable bone in the skull. I didn’t want to bore everyone with a science lesson, so I thought it would be cool to learn just how strong our jaw or bite force is compared to different animals, see the graph below. I also remember reading once that we really haven’t been able to study the bite force of some of the larger whales and sharks, which could easily put the crocodile’s impressive 3700 psi to shame, but the ones listed below are still quite remarkable.
I’ve always found it strange how I can use my mandible hundreds of times a day for eating and talking and it never seems to feel sore but two minutes of chewing some gum and it gets achy! Is that why gum flavor only lasts two to three minutes?!
Thanks to Linda G. Hill for the weekly inspiration of #SoCS, to learn about the rules and how to participate please visit her blog at https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/24840312/posts/1382790700