Saturday 8 June 2019

Do Not Mess With Fish 248,

and you thought fish were fun!



 well this one is not nice to meet on its own turf if it got a lot bigger, and it does have something in common with us, its teeth! all photographs Audrey Velasco-Hogan/AP, but firstly if you want to find one of the dragonfish species called Aristostomias scintillans, it lives in the deep and is caught at depths of up to 1,000 metres (3,000 ft) off the Californian coast and can grow to 25 cm (10 in) in length, 

 the nature of its teeth had been a mystery until Wednesday, when scientists revealed they are made of the same basic material as human teeth but with a different microscopic structure, its teeth, like ours, are made up of an outer layer of enamel and an inner layer of dense bony tissue called dentine, but there are nanoscale crystals in the enamel that prevent any light that exists in the near blackness from reflecting off the tooth surface,

above, a dragonfish specimen collected off the coast of San Diego, California, “Thus, the mouth is invisible and the prey is caught more easily,” said materials scientist Marc André Meyers of the University of California, San Diego, who led the research published in the journal Matter, “Initially, we thought the teeth were made of another, unknown material,. However, we discovered that they are made of the same materials as our human teeth: hydroxyapatite and collagen,” he said, “However, their organisation is significantly different from that of other fish and mammals, this was a surprise for us: same building blocks, different scales and hierarchies, the wonderful world of fish.


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