Dr. Chris J. Law

It's nice and big and flat.

Perfect just to crunch things.

So often if you go to where sea otters are and you're really quiet, you can actually hear them crunching.

crunching on that hard shell.

And it's actually pretty amazing.

And what's super cool about those, uh, the CR adaptations that is that they're enamel on their molars are actually fracture resistant.

So they've evolved to basically be able to sustain all of that, all that fracture forces from the prey they're eating.

Cause if you imagine, if you were trying to eat through clam shells, your teeth would get destroyed instantly.

Yeah.

So I don't know about that, but there are definitely people that have looked at the material properties of those teeth.

And I don't remember exactly what the kind of minerals they have, but they've done comparisons with like ancient humans that had much bigger jaws and bigger molars to crush those types of seeds as well.

And it's very similar there.

morphologies, and it's pretty, pretty impressive.

So it's like kind of through convergent evolution that this type of molars have have evolved to be a perfect teeth to crush things.

Um, there's just so many things to learn about them.

There's not enough time.

Um, so like we know so much about sea otters or relatively just because they're easier to study.

Um, but in terms of the other otters, especially the ones that are,

like in Asia or South America, those ones are much harder to study just because of their locations and because their population sizes are either shrinking or we have no idea.

There's actually another otter species down in South America called the marine otter.