#dentition

Wolverine with an extra tooth! Could be a retained deciduous incisor, but it's as big as the others.

Tooth Wisdom

Enamel is the hardest structure in our bodies, and with good reason – it must protect our teeth from decades of daily gnashing. Here a high-powered microscope pictures enamel crystals (coloured artificially based on their direction) in neat rows on the surface of human teeth from 40,000 years ago. But enamel didn’t stay so neat. Researchers believe human enamel adapted and evolved to meet a changing diet – the crystal pattern became more 'misorientated', which can improve strength, around the time farming changed our diet to chewy seeds and grains (top right, 1,550 years ago). Changes in eating habits since then, including the industrial revolution, don’t appear to have evolved our enamel any further, bottom left (750 years ago) compared to bottom right (50 years ago). Creating bioinspired materials based on tooth enamel might take this evolution further, however, adding more irregularity to crystal patterns to boost strength and resilience.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by Pupa U. P. A. Gilbert and colleagues

Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA; School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Published in Nature, June 2026

Erisol For Sprites Zine 2024

My piece for the sprite edition of the Homestuck Bloodline zines. This was while I was computerless, so it was done entirely in Ibis Paint X on my GalaxyTab. Woulda been easier with a pen, but I don't have one so hey. My focus was on getting transparent/glowy effects right to make him look like a gooey ghost, and I think I did a pretty good job if  I do say so myself :)

A case of skulls focusing on dentition

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Thanks for the submission, @lost80smixtape! You've found yourself a lovely little cat jawbone. Could possibly be bobcat depending on your location but it's pretty small and the shape of that canine tooth looks much better for domestic cat. Neat find!

Easiest way too tell cat jaws from canids or other mammals like raccoons is by dentition—cats have only two lower premolars and one lower molar which makes them pretty distinctive. Canids generally have four lower premolars and three molars. Here's a reference shot I took a while back of a coyote lower jaw for comparison:

And raccoons have four lower premolars and two molars. Here's a set of raccoon lower jaws for reference: