The US ‘Discovers’ Scaled Armour
A hilarious US report published on Sunday claims that scales that prevent fish from the bites of rival fish may hold the key to the armour of the future. The ?groundbreaking’ study ?revealed’ that the lightweight, multi-layered design of its scales has helped the Polypterus senegalus survive for 96 million years, the team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reports.
The report appeared in the journal Nature Materials, the MIT team said they have unlocked the secret of how it works. Each scale is layered so it deflects the pressure of a crunching bite, they said.
Now, please allow me to interject - Us British folk are well aware of how scaled armour works…we had it over 4 centuries ago, not to mention the Greeks way, way back. The US didn’t have medieval times, yet somehow they believe they’ve gone and solved one of life’s great mysteries? Um, sorry chaps, but?someone else?got their first.
“Cracks do not travel far - the design forces cracks to run in a circle around the penetration site, rather than spreading through the entire scale and leading to catastrophic failure,” they said.
“Many of the design principles we describe - durable interfaces and energy-dissipating mechanisms, for instance - may be translatable to human armour systems,” MIT’s Christine Ortiz, who led the study, said in a statement.
With funding from the U.S. Army, Ortiz and colleagues carefully studied scales from P. senegalus, which lives at the bottom of freshwater, muddy shallows and estuaries in Africa.
What they should have done instead was rent out Monty Python and the Holy Grail. That would have saved them a whole load of work.
“The primary predators of P. senegalus are known to be its own species or its carnivorous vertebrate relatives, and biting takes place during territorial fighting and feeding,” Ortiz and colleagues wrote in their report.
It evolved the armour millions of years ago, when fearsome predators lurked. “In ancient times, many large invertebrate predators existed. For example, the carnivorous eurypterid was a giant arthropod that possessed biting mouth parts, grasping jaws, claws, spines and a spiked tail,” they wrote.
*slow clap*
