Dr. Yara Haridi

And so what we have is a couple of fossils that are covered in these little bumps all the way across their face.

And right at the margin of the jaw, which had now evolved, you have sharper and pointier odontodes.

And they kind of grade into the mouth.

And then you have actual pointy things in the mouth.

It's done ostensibly differently.

teeth.

So that's one way that we think it happened.

The other way that we think it could have happened is just whatever genetics that make up odontodes, they got re-expressed inside the mouth.

Right.

So it doesn't have to be a gradual, like actual movement of the structure into the mouth, but it can be a re-expression.

Just, Hey, let me take this toolbox that I use up here and I'm going to express it in the mouth instead.

So tusks are just teeth, but they're fancy teeth in that they are usually non-replacing.

They're usually continuously growing.

So elephants, the famous tusks, when they're babies, they have a little itty bitty enamel cap on the end of their tooth.

And then as it keeps growing, that usually gets worn away because they just like rub them on trees.

They dig with them.

They fight.

And then it ends up all being dentine.

yeah got it okay i wonder why they don't keep the enamel since the enamel's so hard well i think it's just it gets worn away after a while um also there's a bunch of studies that are really interesting that show that elephants use their tusks as like sensory things so they hit them on the ground and they like feel vibrations with them yeah so there's some kind of feedback that they're they're not just like whacking around big sticks like there is some feedback it's a living tissue right

This is such a good question.