When you think of white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias), one of the first things you probably think about is their jaws – or the movie Jaws, in which white shark jaws were prominently featured! White sharks have large jaws but it’s hard to get a sense of just how large they are given how different a shark skull is from a human skull. For Shark Week 2021, we created this illustration to show the relative size of white sharks’ jaws. To do this, we scaled the jaws of a human to the same size as those of a shark, relative to the overall size of the skull. The resulting tweet was one of our most popular tweets of 2021, with over 160 retweets and 850 likes.
Illustrated by: Michael Fath, MS
Edited by: Aaron Olsen, PhD
Software used: Adobe Illustrator
License: CC BY-NC-SA 3D Anatomy Studios