Do mineral crystals stiffen bone by straitjacketing its collagen?

Theories that assume that the collagen and the mineral of bone have the same properties in bone as they do when they are by themselves have difficulty in accounting for bone's tensile stiffness. The collagen fibers are long but stretchy: the apatite crystals are stiff enough, but too short to be effective tension carriers. In bone the mineral is so finely divided that each collagen molecule may have a mineral crystal next to it. It is proposed that collagen is the prime tension carrier in bone, and that via short molecular struts the mineral crystals prevent the naturally kinky collagen molecules from straightening under tensile stress, which greatly increases the collagen's tensile stiffness.