We’re gonna need a bigger boat. And grenades. Maybe a tank.
These are the jaws of Megalodon - a close relative of the great white shark that is, mercifully, extinct. It was much larger, as cheery naked blue man will illustrate (why do you never look to your left, naked blue man?)
It also probably had the strongest bite in history. Its teeth have left scars on the bones from several fossil whales, as well as cradling the buttocks of this slightly non-plussed Victorian gent.
Frog eats insect - this is the natural order of things. The Epomis beetle spits upon the natural order of things, then latches onto its face with double-hooked jaws and eats it alive.
The beetle hunts frogs in two ways. As a larve, it actually waves to a frog to lure it in, waits until the tongue comes out, grabs on for a zip-line to the frog’s face, and starts to chew. The beetle always wins.
The adult jumps onto a frog’s back, cuts through its leg muscles to paralyse it, and then eats it alive.
What’s scarier than a centipede? A centipede that sprints.
The house centipede has the same poison fangs that normal centipedes do, but they can move towards you at great speed thanks to its long spindly legs. They have a top speed of 40 cm per second.
Incidentally, 40 cm is the exact distance between the house centipede and your face.
Here’s the mouth of the reticulated python; behind it lies up to 10 metres of snake. Fortunately, you’ll never have to know what it’s like to be swallowed by this mouth. GOOD NEWS! Unfortunately, that’s because the python will have suffocated the life out of you first. BAD NEWS!
Do giant snakes like this actually eat people? Yes. Yes they really do. There’s a Philippine tribe where a quarter of the men have been attacked by these snakes.
(By the way, see the hole in the bottom of the mouth? That helps the python to breathe when it’s swallowing a meal much larger than itself. I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that after it choked you to death, you won’t return the favour.)
Image: ARKive
The pork tapeworm (Taenia solium) doesn’t really have any jaws, or a mouth. Cool. It only latches onto your guts with the grappling hooks on its face. No biggie. And it can grow to several metres in length.
Humans can become infected by the tapeworm after eating undercooked pork. Most have no symptoms. Yay! Some get seizures, blindness, and a mild case of death. Boo!
Everyone loves cookies. Cookies are fun! The Cookie Monster is cute!
Yes, well the fun and cute end with the cookie-cutter shark, because the “cookie” in its name is more accurately described by “bloody hunk of carved flesh”. Thankfully, the shark’s just 2 ft long, but there is at least one documented case of an attack on humans.
The greater honeyguide leads humans to honey, in exchange for a few sweet combs. That’s nice, isn’t it? Yes, well, it’s all fun and games until you brutally stab-murder your foster-siblings to death just after they’re born.
The honeyguide is a parasite that lays its eggs in another bird’s nest. The honeyguide chick hatches first and when its siblings emerge, it stabs them to death with its sharp bill-hook. Find out more here.
What’s worse than venomous snake fangs? Really long venomous snake fangs. And those of the Gaboon viper’s are the longest in the world - up to 2 inches in some cases. As in all vipers, the fangs hinge backwards so the snake doesn’t stab itself through its lower jaw when it closes its mouth. Evolution FTW.
The stoplight loosejaw can dislocate its head and lunge its jaw at food, a trick that many of us have surely tried but few have succeeded at. Note that the lower jaw has no floor to it.
Source: NHM. More info here.
This post is NSFA (not safe for arachnophobes). I don’t honestly know why I bothered writing that because if any of you *are* arachnophobes (or, for that matter, sentient), you are currently cowering behind your chair or gently throwing up somewhere.
This is the highly venomous funnel-web spider. It’s part of a large group of spiders whose fangs point down rather than towards each other. The upshot of this is that they need to rear upwards before they bite.
