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Published online 14 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.824
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Ugly bats are built to bite
A face that only a mother could love conceals a skull with a surprisingly powerful jaw.
With a strangely naked face covered in skin flaps and a wide, foreshortened skull, the head of the rarely seen, fruit-eating, wrinkle-faced bat (Centurio senex) has been an enigma to biologists for a long time.
Now, a team led by Elizabeth Dumont at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst has discovered that the oddly-shaped skulls include jaws that are more powerful than not just other fruit bats but also much larger predatory bats, which need to be able to sink their teeth into tough hides.
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