Dr. Yara Haridi

tooth tissues on it.

We're the first animal to have bone tissues on it.

And as far as we know, we kind of trace it all the way back deep, deep, deep in time into like the middle Ordovician.

So about 455 million years ago.

Woof.

Yeah, hard to conceptualize.

So dinosaurs went extinct when?

65, yeah.

Yeah, right.

And then these bone has existed for a very long time.

Tooth tissues have existed for a very long time.

And I say tooth tissues because they weren't exactly teeth.

I love, did they just gum things to death in the ocean?

Probably, but also more likely is that they were just suction feeding.

There was some kind of filter feeding that happened early on.

So the very first tooth-like structures to appear in the fossil record don't appear in the mouth.

They appear on the outside of fish.

They appear on the outside on these like scales and dermal bone, which is partially nightmarish until you see how ridiculous these fish look like because they're nonsense looking.

They look like, you know, like a handheld vacuum that you're going to like clean your car with.

They look like that, but stick googly eyes on the end.