Study Reveals Surprising ForcStudy Reveals Surprising Forc

These features originate from thickened sections of the embryo's outermost skin layer, called placodes, and their arrangement is determined by waves of interacting chemistry known as Turing patterns, which are encoded in the animals' genes. Crocodile's head scales are instead sculpted by a mechanical process, which the team originally attributed to tensile stress, meaning the furrows between scales would be similar to the stretch marks we humans might experience during a growth spurt. While they may have been right about the mechanical source of scale patterning, the team has ditched the tensile stress theory after the new study revealed an entirely different force is at work. "Here we show that the patterning of crocodile head scale