Tasmanian Devil: Bone-Crushing Jaws and a Contagious Cancer

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Early European explorers in Tasmania heard unearthly screeches in the dark and named the unseen creature Beelzebub's pup. Daylight revealed a chubby, shuffling, dog sized marsupial that stores fat in its tail. This episode looks past the cartoon and the settler myths to the mechanics of a specialized survivor: an animal that once ranged across the Australian mainland until a drying climate, vanishing megafauna, and the pack hunting dingo pushed it out, leaving Tasmania as its island sanctuary.

The devil is built like a walking pair of bolt cutters, with a bite force quotient of 181, jaws that open to 80 degrees, and teeth that keep growing for life. Its screaming feasts turn out to be an orderly system of 20 postures and 11 vocal sounds that settles disputes without bloodshed. Then came devil facial tumor disease, identified in 1996, a transmissible cancer that exploits the species' low genetic diversity and has cut wild populations by up to 80 percent.

Pound for pound, a Tasmanian devil bites harder than a lion, a tiger, or a grizzly bear, thanks to a pronounced sagittal crest anchoring enormous jaw muscles.
A devil can eat up to 40 percent of its body weight in 30 minutes, and researchers find snake fangs, echidna spines, and denim in the scats.
A mother delivers 20 to 30 young the size of a grain of rice after three weeks of gestation, but her pouch has only four nipples.
Because the devils' MHC genes are nearly identical across the species, the immune system fails to recognize tumor cells passed by a bite as foreign.
Culling failed, yet wild devils are evolving natural resistance, and in 2020 healthy animals were reintroduced to a sanctuary on mainland Australia.

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