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Re: [ Hadrosaur teeth]
"Norton, Patrick" <Patrick.Norton@state.me.us> wrote:
> As I understand the chewing apparatus of Hadrosaurs, the maxillary bone
> was capable of flexing outward slightly, allowing the surface of the
> maxillary teeth to move across the surface of the dentary teeth as the
> biting force was applied by the jaw muscles. This presumably provided a
> mechanism for grinding food in an animal that had no side-to-side motion
> of its lower jaw. And since the occlusal surfaces usually met at a
> downward and outward angle of 40 to 60 degrees from the horizontal, I
> presume the thinking is that such grinding moves the food downward and
> outward into the buccal area. Thus the need for cheeks or some form of
> rhamphothecal covering to keep the food in the mouth.
>
> Is this a generally accurate description of current thinking? It seems
> reasonable, but has anyone actually modeled the specialized teeth and
> maxilla in Hadrosaurs to see how they affected food movement in the
> mouth?
*****************************************************************
That's about right. It's rather neat actually. These animals thought up an
entirely different way to chew their food.
As for working models, I don't think that there are any physical models, but
there are some computer models of hadrosaurs chewing.
Does anyone out there know if they have one of these models on the net?
Archosaur J
Jurassosaurus's Reptipage: A page devoted to the study of the reptilia
http://members.tripod.com/~jurassosauridae/index.html
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