the teeth of Helicoprion implies a diet of soft bodied prey, as hard shelled prey would simply slip out of the mouth. Due to the narrow nature of the jaw, suction feeding is unlikely to have been effective, and Helicoprion is thought to have been a bite feeder. Biomechanical modelling by Ramsay et al. (2015) suggests that the teeth in the whorl had distinct functions depending on where they were in the spiral. The frontmost teeth served to snag and pull prey further into the mouth, while the middle teeth spear and the hind teeth served to puncture and bring prey further into the throat, with the prey being squeezed between the whorl and the two halves of the palatoquadrate. The labial cartilage served to buttress and provide support to the whorl. Helicoprion may have started with a large gape during initial prey capture, followed by smaller jaw opening and closing cycles to further transport prey into the mouth, as is done by modern bite-feeding sharks. While modern sharks shake their heads from side to side to facilitate sawing and cutting their prey, the teeth of Helicoprion would likely further cut the prey during the jaw opening, due to the arc-like path of the front teeth, similar to the slashing motion of a knife. Helicoprion likely used a series of rapid, forceful jaw closures to initially capture and push prey deeper into the oral cavity, followed by cyclic opening and closing of the jaw to facilitate sawing through prey. Ramsay and colleagues further suggested that the whorl could have served as an effective mechanism for deshelling hard-shelled cephalopods such as ammonoids and nautiloids, which were abundant in Early Permian oceans. If a hard-shelled cephalopod was bitten head-on, it was possible that the whorl could have served to pull the soft body out of the shell and into the mouth. During jaw closure, the palatoquadrates and tooth whorl combined to form a three-point system, equivalent to the set-up of an inverted three-point flexural test. This system was effective at trapping and holding soft parts to increase cutting efficiency and provide leverage against hard-shelled prey. At the three points of contact, the estimated bite force ranges between , with estimated bite stresses ranging from during initial prey contact. This large bite force may have allowed Helicoprion to expand its diet to vertebrates, as its jaw apparatus was more than capable of cutting