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By my thinking, the damage to the brain could outweigh the better foraging. Then I thought that the brain mooshing into the front of the skull later in the peck would turn the head into a dead-blow hammer, which are still quite effective hammers.




Sweet, thanks for the info!
I was unsure of the effect of the dead-blow, since “minimizing damage” and “same driving force” sound contradictory to me. The latter makes it sound as if both would drive a nail to the same depth, and I was thinking the beak is effectively a nail. I’m glad the paper mentions concussions, and I’ll give em that bird and primate brains are probably similar enough in that respect.
Odd that the tongue wraps around though. I’d figure it would just slide down the neck, since that seems closer to what we have.