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experimentally. This experiment was designed to determine whether the hy-
pothesis that a tooth could break a circular hole in a shell could be falsified
(shown to be false).
Etica constructed an artificial mosasaur jaw. It did not look much like
the real thing, being fabricated of metal with series of teeth made out of nails
and screws, but nevertheless it closely approximated the real thing in many
ways. The "teeth" descended onto the shell surface just as a mosasaur jaw
would have, and a gauge attached to the jaw showed the amount of pressure
needed to produce a break. A nautilus shell was put between the jaws, and
the type of damage inflicted on the shell was observed. For several days Tom
Daniel's fourth-floot lab reverberated with cracks and snaps as shell after
shell fell victim to these jaws of death. An army of mosasaurs could not have
had so much fun. And in all the carnage that ensued, not once was a round
circular hole approximating the size of a mosasaur's tooth ever produced.
All nautilus shells we had smashed up to this point had been empty.
What might be the effect of a living body in the shell? Might a circular hole
be punched in a shell filled with flesh? To test this possibility, Erica con-
structed nautilus "bodies" out of Jell-O and stuffed them into the shell. Once
again, the shells smashed gleefully, and larger circular holes the size of the
teeth never formed (Smaller holes, never circular,
did
appear rarely in the
walls of the shell in tegions underlain by the chambers.) A conclusion was
reached: Unless ammonite shells were radically different from nautilus shells
(which all investigators agree is not the case), thete is no way that a mosasaur
could have produced a circular tooth hole in an ammonite shell.
The mosasaut jaw produced in Tom Daniel's lab was constructed with
a single intention: to test whether a circular hole could be punched in a
chambered cephalopod shell—and thus to falsify (if possible) the hypothesis
that mosasaur teeth left circular tooth marks in ammonite shells more than
65 million years ago. That mechanical jaw was crude to look at, but it did its
job. Soon, howevet, a far more realistic test was made.
The Kase-Johnson team was also intetested in actual tests, and they
had access to far bettet material. The Tyrell Museum has a large number of
beautifully preserved mosasaur skulls in its collections. Using molding and
