In another forum im in a debate about teeth.. the question is can you tell what the primary diet meat or vegetation just by the species teeth What are your thoughts?
Not 100%, but in general you can. For instance rodents are herbivores, right? Not the Grasshopper Mouse.
Or Pandas, they still have quite carnivorous teeth from their ancient ancestors but they aren't very carnivorous. Depends on how the animal evolved.
Yes, in general you can tell a great deal about the diet of an animal from its teeth. Or to be more precise, you can tell a great deal about the diet of an animal's ancestors from its teeth. There are always exceptions, based on recent changes in the diet of an animal. The grasshopper mouse, Onochomys, is a classic example. Pronghorn antelope are another. They have the highest crowned (hypsodont) teeth of any living ungulate, and are often used as a classic example of a grazer which feeds on grass containing hard silica particles (phytoliths) which wear down the teeth, as well as the dirt that gets taken in when feeding on a food plant so close to the ground. But modern pronghorn, in general, eat around 2% grass in their diet. They are mostly browsers. But they evolved in the Miocene, at the same time that grasslands were spreading to become a domininat vegetation type in North America. The immediate bear ancestors of Pandas aren't carnivores, although they do eat meat. They are omnivores, and their broad, flat rear molars are are typical of omnivores. You can also predict with considerable accuracy what a bird eats by the shape and structure of its beak. Short, heavy (deep) beaks are typical of seed and nut crushers, long thin beaks of insectivorous birds which use the beak like a pair of tweezeers to pick insects out out of the soil or tree bark, and so forth. Again, none of this is 100%, but nothing in science is. Rich
There has always been considerable debate on whether our species was designed to be herbivorous or omnivorous by an examination of the evolution of our teeth. One thing I have observed recently is the increasing number of people who have terrible teeth, and a surprising number of them are very young. I came across the following article that proposes that it is the advent of cooking that has most recently affected the evolution of teeth in our species. I found it rather interesting, as I work in the grocery sector and I observe that all grocery stores carry more 'food-like products' than what our ancestors would have recognized as food. So much processed food requires very little chewing and marketing promotes these textures. Once upon a time, it was only babies, the ill and the elderly that required soft and liquid foods. Now we are attempting to market this to people of all ages. No wonder dentists are in such high demand, IMO. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7035-human-dental-chaos-linked-to-evolution-of-cooking.html
Many species are scavengers. We never find whole dead rats around our place, just their skins: they eat their own dead. 40% of mammal species are rodents, so it stands to reason that they might have a wider range of differences than other orders such as the lagomorphs (rabbits, hares and pikas). Chiroptera (bats) account for 20% of species and they vary from fructivores to insectivores to parasites. By the time Homo sapiens appeared, our ancestral species had already settled that question by becoming the apex predator of the entire planetary ecosystem, dining on the flesh of both bears and sharks. However, our teeth are not the teeth of a predator or any kind of carnivore. Our brains evolved the intelligence to create blades out of flint and to use those blades, first to scrape the bits of meat left on the bones by the predators, increasing our protein intake so as to support even larger brains, and second to go hunting and become full-time carnivores. Chewing all that meat was indeed a problem for a species with our dentition, requiring three hours per day to ingest enough nutrition for an active Paleolithic tribe member. Then we invented the technology of controlled fire and cooking changed that, long before evolution could respond by changing the shape of our teeth. So we still have teeth not much different from chimpanzees and gorillas, yet we can gobble up a day's ration of cooked protein pretty quickly. The digestive tract is also a good clue to diet. We have a much shorter gut than the other apes, so we can't host a large enough bacteria culture to digest cellulose for us. We can eat roots, stalks and leaves, but only for the same reason that we can eat a meat-intensive diet: cooking. It breaks down the cellulose. We still can't digest it but at least we can get to the starch and other nutrients locked inside it. As I noted, this trend started one or two hundred thousand years ago when we learned how to soften our food by cooking it. You have to reach a certain number of posts before all the features are unlocked to you. It's the way the forum protects itself against commercial spammers.
Also don't forget canines in some of our cousins are used primarily for displays of aggression. So there's the wonderful wild card of adaptation to throw a monkey into the works, as it were. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Then, when the nearly complete Ardipithecus was found, there was some excitement over her having less pronounced canines, insofar as this would exclude chimps as Aridi's recent ancestors, and it limits her society from relying on aggression as the mate-choosing factor. In fact, one of the proposed scenarios was that the males traded food for sex. So again, that puts the dentition into a whole new class of cause-and-effect, way beyond the simple choice between sinew vs fiber. By the way: Are there any species that regenerate their teeth, from juvenile to adult, besides us?
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! This is Hydropotes inermis, the Chinese Water Deer. There are a couple other of the small deer species which have canines like these in the males.
~Aqueous Id No mammals regenerate teeth. But mammals replace their teeth - they have a set of milk teeth (deciduous dentition) which are replaced by the permanent teeth as they are pushed out by the errupting permanent teeth. All mammals do this, although some modify it, as in the elephant, which has only one functional tooth in each side of the jaw at a time. It has 6 cheek-teeth (three premolars and three molars) which errupt one after the other throughout the life of the animal.
Hi In all about teeth,just to realize to keep the better in order to avoid and mouth disease which converted into bery bery .
