These prehistoric teeth were the sharpest the world has ever known

The team found that the conodonts did not process food using a mechanism based on muscular force, as mammals do. Instead, they relied on minuscule forces that became extremely concentrated as a result of their teeth's extreme sharpness, and the special way in which they gnawed.

Unlike mammalian teeth, which close perpendicularly (up and down), conodont teeth turned that action 90 degrees, slicing food from left to right. "The inter-angles of the blade-like teeth would have been trapped first at the back, rocked forward and separated again," explains Donoghue.

evolved teeth that would be completely impractical in the mouth of a bigger creature, or one with more muscular jaws.

How, then, did future vertebrates come to develop the teeth that we're all familiar with today? Did different dental structures emerge independently as the need for pre-digestive food-processing became necessary for survival ( a common hypothesis ), or did they somehow manage to evolve from the razor-sharp serrations of creatures like conodonts? It's exciting to imagine how modeling techniques like the ones used by Donoghue's team will improve our understanding of vertebrate dental evolution in the years to come.

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