Limpet teeth have apparently removed spider silk as the strongest material on Earth, U.K. engineers have found in a new study.
According to BBC News, the sea snail's "teeth" actually line their tongues and are used to pull food off of rocks. These teeth are even known to scrape pieces of rock away as well.
The researchers published their work in the Royal Society's journal Interface.
"Biology is a great source of inspiration as an engineer," study lead author Asa Barber, of the University of Portsmouth, told BBC News. "These teeth are made up of very small fibers, put together in a particular way - and we should be thinking about making our own structures following the same design principles."
"Limpet" is just a given name for the sea snail species Patella vulgata and they cover themselves with a conical shell.
"Until now we thought that spider silk was the strongest biological material because of its super-strength and potential applications in everything from bullet-proof vests to computer electronics," Barber said in a statement. "But now we have discovered that limpet teeth exhibit a strength that is potentially higher."
The researchers said they used a metric called gigapascals (GPa) for their study. They equated the GPa of limpet teeth to the pressure in the Earth's crust necessary to convert carbon into diamonds.
"People are always trying to find the next strongest thing, but spider silk has been the winner for quite a few years now," Barber told the BBC. "So we were quite happy that the limpet teeth exceeded that.
"One of my colleagues on the paper, from Italy, found some exotic spider silk that was about 4.5GPa, and we measured about 5GPa."
