Dr. Yara Haridi

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, always call somebody or at least look it up, see where you're at.

Especially if you're like anywhere near public lands, you shouldn't probably be picking them up in the first place because the context is part of the science.

So like where you found it, what's around it, etc.,

Not all teeth are super valuable to science.

So like a lot of shark teeth, we have just tons.

Some dinosaur teeth.

So like I was working, I was in Alberta for a bit and we found a whole hadrosaur dental battery.

And hadrosaurs merge a bunch of these really thin leaf-shaped teeth into like a brick and then chew with the brick.

Yeah, because they want to chew a lot of plant matter with multiple tissues at once, right?

So they use multiple teeth at once to kind of chew and grind against this big brick of teeth.

And so you find them all over the place because they fall apart when the animal's dead because they were held together with ligaments.

So herbivore teeth are really weird, particularly deer and...

what is it, horses and camel, anything that eats a lot of abrasive material.

They use something called cementum as how they attach their teeth.

They basically chew on multiple tissues at all times.

If you've ever seen like a deer tooth, it's like wavy at the top with like little pits.

They want these cusps to be pointy and they want the pits to be deeper.

And how you do that is have some harder tissues and softer tissues.

And so that way you're like basically making a grater for the plant matter.