Models such as those shown here, which contain as many as 3,000,000 brick elements, can be fully assembled within four days. The application of these procedures has provided new insights into the evolution of vertebrate feeding behaviour.

At a fundamental level our modeling demonstrates that external stresses and strains do not necessarily reflect internal distributions and further suggests that the relationship between proportions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ bone is not simply driven by a requirement to minimise mass, but also by a complex interplay of factors that allows for greater neural control over the risk of catastrophic bone failure.

Simulations designed to investigate more specific questions have shown that:

1, bite force in the iconic fossil sabretooth, Smilodon fatalis, was relatively weak and that the killing bite was delivered with considerable precision,

2, the skull of the Komodo dragon is optimised to resist biting and pulling forces simultaneously and localised differences in bone composition can greatly influence the distribution of stress throughout the entire structure,

3, broad resemblance notwithstanding, informative differences have been identified in the cranial mechanics of taxa commonly considered convergent, such as the Tasmanian tiger and grey wolf and,

4, in crocodilians the dorsoventrally flattened rostrum of generalist species is not well adapted to resist high bite forces, leading to the conclusion that a need to minimise hydrodynamic resistance while feeding on fish, which are caught with a rapid sideways sweep of the snout, may have exerted a major influence in the evolution of most species.