But gorillas are eager to do it, despite the fact that their teeth don’t seem equipped for the job.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way:

After watching Loango gorillas chow down on Coula edulis nuts for over three and a half years, Adam van Casteren of Washington University in St. Louis and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute published their surprising findings in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. These nuts are approximately the size of ping pong-balls, and are a seasonal resource in tropical west African forests; in this part of Gabon, they’re only available from December through February, but are an energy-rich source of food…

The gorillas were doing it the old fashioned way — with their teeth. This behavior was surprising to the researchers, because while gorillas have powerful jaws and chewing muscles, they don’t have the kinds of flat, rounded molars that mammals who routinely crack hard foods open do. The sharp cusps on gorillas’ molars are an adaptation to the fibrous vegetation that makes up most of their diet (though western lowland gorillas do also eat a lot of fruit). But these cusps are a biological liability when it comes to eating hard objects, because they don’t distribute force the way a lower, more rounded cusp would. A cracked tooth could compromise a gorilla’s ability to eat and a serious infection could be life-threatening.

And yet they do it. Those nuts must be mighty tasty and mighty important to their diet.