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Paleontologists have long inferred the dietary preferences of Mesozoic marine reptiles based on skull and tooth morphologies. Previous researchers have hypothesized that different marine reptile tooth shapes evolved due to a functional trade-off between robusticity and puncture efficiency. We hypothesize that there is a trade-off between load-bearing capacity and puncture efficiency, but these performances have not been previously measured in marine reptile dentition. Here, we examine how tooth morphology influences the load-bearing capacity of dentition and observe the stress distribution utilizing Finite Element Analysis (FEA). We simulate forces mimicking biting, pulling, and shaking across 33 digitized teeth and 14 theoretical models. The resulting Mesh Weighted Arithmetic Mean (MWAM) values demonstrate that with greater recurvature of a tooth, the greater the stress experienced during the bite and shake scenarios and a decrease in stress experienced during the pull condition. Additionally, our theoretical and real models show that teeth are most likely to experience failure under pull and shake conditions. Tooth slenderness (crown height/base width) greatly influences a tooth’s load-bearing capacity during the three load conditions. We found that some real morphologies departed from the response that would be expected based on this feature, suggesting that finer morphological features also likely influence a tooth’s load-bearing. Our study provides quantitative evidence of how differences in marine reptile tooth morphology influence load-bearing capacity, providing a greater appreciation of the links between form, function, and dietary ecology.
White et al. (Fri,) studied this question.