Beautiful Alien Jaws
Have some amazing photos to start your week
These animals have been on my list for a potential future episode for ages … but that list is so long I could be sitting here years from now still wondering when I might get to them. So let’s just do this, and accept that it might be a slight spoiler for some distant-future episode.
Moray eels are - some of them, at least - strikingly beautiful, impressive fish. Under-appreciated. They are also hiding some of the most extraordinary anatomy in the Animal Kingdom, which is a slightly creepy echo of a famous science-fiction horror franchise …
Let’s just concentrate on the beauty first, though.
and last but definitely not least the Dragon Moray aka Leopard Moray:
Photo: TANAKA Juuyoh (田中十洋) - posted to Flickr as Dragon Eel (トラウツボ), CC BY 2.0
Amazing creatures imho. Equipped with amazing jaws.
Remember these guys?:
Of course you do. Xenomorphs. With a protruding internal second set of jaws:
Xenomorph photo: By Eden, Janine and Jim from New York City - Xenomorph, CC BY 2.0
Moray eels have probably the closest thing in Nature to precisely that. Pharyngeal jaws. A second set of jaws, complete with teeth, that are held back in the throat most of the time but can be projected forward to grab prey in the eel’s mouth and pull it back down the throat.
Illustration: By Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation (after Rita Mehta, UC Davis); Ryan Wilson (pbroks13) - Pharyngeal jaws of moray eels. CC BY 3.0.
Utterly mad/awesome. Not, apparently, a direct inspiration for the xenomorph design, because the workings of the moray eel’s jaw anatomy were not fully understood at the time the Alien was being invented. So convergent evolution between … Nature and science fictional art & design.