How hard can a great white bite? The shark (Carcharodon carcharias) can chomp with about 18,000 Newtons of downward force — the strongest known bite of any living species — and its habit of shaking its head from side to side might increase this further.
Stephen Wroe at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues calculated this flesh-ripping force from a three-dimensional computer model of the animal's skull, jaw and muscles (pictured right). Sharks' skeletons are made of cartilage rather than the much stiffer bone, and although this causes the jaws to undergo greater deformation, it seems to be no impediment to a powerful bite.
The team estimates that the even larger extinct shark C. megalodon, which is thought to have hunted whales, may have bitten with an order of magnitude more force.
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Palaeobiology: Megabite. Nature 454, 1033 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/4541033a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/4541033a
