Researchers have found a biomaterial with surprising features in the skin of a lizard. The material is hard like enamel but is structured differently. Understanding the material on the nanoscale opens up new routes in designing for hard-wearing applications.
The Mexican beaded lizard has little hard plates in its skin called osteoderms, which are made of bone and topped with a so-called capping tissue. The plates protect the lizard from being hurt when bitten, but are also unique from a materials standpoint. An international research team has used the beamline DanMAX to study the material in the plates, particularly the capping tissue.
“We chose this particular lizard because previous work suggested it had a very stiff capping tissue. There are several open questions, such as how such a stiff tissue can form on top of bone and what the structure and mechanics of the capping material are,” says Henrik Birkedal, one of the contributors to the study.
The experiments show that the capping tissue is as hard as enamel. However, its internal structure is different. So, it looks like these types of hard materials could be realised in more than one way, and due to the variability in structure, potentially with different other mechanical properties besides the hardness.
“One of the most important results of the study was realising that nature fabricates hard mineralised tissues in a way that we had not seen before,” says Birkedal.
Researchers often study nature to understand and ultimately copy the materials created by evolution and natural selection. The research is called biomimicry or bioinspiration.
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