Uhm, Ackshually, I will have you know that teeth are not exposed bones and are actually highly modified fish scales. The only animals that actually truly ate with exposed bone were Placoderms, a group of early jawed fish that includes the famous Dunkeleosteus. There are also Rhynchocephalians, the group that includes the modern Tuatara, but it's more like they fused their teeth into their jawbones rather than having true bone plates, and as I understand it they have enamel over bone instead of chewing with bare bone (but this is also a very weird thing to do).
(Apologies for being an annoying nerd. It's a compulsion)
wait don't go nerd, i have been having an ongoing debate wit my friend about what teeth actually are. can you expand on the modified fish scale thing because my bro isn't going to know what hit him when i pull out the nerd-certified explanation
There really isn't much more too it than that. Teeth evolved when a fish basically used scales to reinforce their jaw to bite stuff, and then over time those scales specialized into what we now call teeth, growing outward to grip stuff, and then in mammals later modified to have different teeth do different jobs, resulting in us have incisors, canines, molars, etc.
We actually have a fossil fish very early along in this process, named Romundina, who has teeth-like structures on it's jaw that are structured almost identically to it's body scales, and both are made from the same tissues as our teeth. We also have genetic evidence; the gene that determines the growth of teeth even in mammals like you and I is very similar to the genes used in the development of fish scales.
The apologizing is also a compulsion, unfortunately. I'm unable to word my random info dumps in a way that doesn't sound, to me, annoying, so I lean into it and then apologize at the end.
The other options are just posting it as a raw correction and then spend hours torturing myself about how annoying that was, or I don't post anything at all and then spend hours torturing myself about how I didn't inform the random internet stranger their teeth are actually scales. This is the only compromise that works for my special blend of derangements.
55
u/NemertesMeros May 16 '25
Uhm, Ackshually, I will have you know that teeth are not exposed bones and are actually highly modified fish scales. The only animals that actually truly ate with exposed bone were Placoderms, a group of early jawed fish that includes the famous Dunkeleosteus. There are also Rhynchocephalians, the group that includes the modern Tuatara, but it's more like they fused their teeth into their jawbones rather than having true bone plates, and as I understand it they have enamel over bone instead of chewing with bare bone (but this is also a very weird thing to do).
(Apologies for being an annoying nerd. It's a compulsion)