Latest Jaw Stories

New research from Brown University shows that fish and mammals chew differently. Fish use tongue muscles to thrust food backward, while mammals use tongue muscles to position food for grinding. The evolutionary divergence is believed to have occurred with amphibians, though further research is needed to identify which species and when. Results are published in Integrative and Comparative Biology.Evolution has made its marks "” large and small "” in innumerable patterns of life. New...

A fang-like tooth on double upper lips, spiny teeth on the tongue and a pulley-like mechanism to move the tongue backwards and forwards "“ this bizarre bite belongs to a conodont and, thanks to a fresh fossil find, has now been analyzed and reconstructed by a Swiss-French research team headed by paleontologists from the University of Zurich. Their analysis sheds some light on the evolutionary origin of jaws. Using a 3D animated model, the reconstruction shows for the first time how the...

A reptile that lived 275 million years ago in present day Oklahoma is giving paleontologists a glimpse of the oldest known toothache, predating by 200 million years the previous record for the earliest known evidence of tooth decay in a terrestrial vertebrate.The researchers, led by Professor Robert Reisz, who chairs the Department of Biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, found evidence of bone damage due to oral infection in Paleozoic reptiles as they adapted to living on...

A half-billion years ago, vertebrates lacked the ability to chew their food. They did not have jaws. Instead, their heads consisted of a flexible, fused basket of cartilage.This week, an international team of researchers led by a faculty member from the University of Colorado at Boulder published evidence that three genes in jawless vertebrates might have been key to the development of jaws in higher vertebrates.The finding is potentially significant in that it might help explain how...

The robust jaws and formidable teeth of some of our ancestors and ape cousins may suggest that humans are wimps when it comes to producing a powerful bite: but a new study has found the opposite is true, with major implications for our understanding of diet in ancestral humans.The surprise findings suggest that early modern humans did not necessarily need to use tools and cooking to process high-nutrient hard foods, such as nuts - and perhaps less tough foods such as meat - but may have lost...

Scientists announced recently that they have created a joint in the jaw from human adult stem cells, an advance which could revolutionize reconstructive surgery.It is hoped the technique could be used not only to treat disorders of the specific joint, but more widely to correct problems with other bones too.The bone which has been created in the lab is known as the temporomandibular joint (TMJ). Problems with this joint such as TMJD (Temporomandibular Joint Disorder) can cause pain in the...

Researchers from London's Natural History Museum have found a rare fish that features small bone fangs.Found exclusively in a single Burmese stream, the Danionella dracula appears to have lost its teeth over time before it later evolved the fangs made of bone, researchers said in the Royal Society's journal Proceedings B."When you watch them in captivity you can see the males sparring," NHM's Ralf Britz told BBC News. "They display with their lower jaws open incredibly widely,...

New research published Wednesday shows that sex has been around for much longer than many scientists had previously believed, with internal fertilization prevalent among prehistoric fish living on tropical reefs during the Devonian period 380 million years ago.The study reveals new insight on the reproductive history of all jawed vertebrates, including humans."It shifts how we think about how reproduction evolved. You're a jawed vertebrate and I'm a jawed vertebrate, so this is our own...

A paper in this week's PLoS Biology reports that a common gene regulatory circuit controls the development of all dentitions, from the first teeth in the throats of jawless fishes that lived half a billion years ago, to the incisors and molars of modern vertebrates, including you and me."It's likely that every tooth made throughout the evolution of vertebrates has used this core set of genes," said Gareth Fraser, postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech's School of Biology.The first...

A Swedish scientist has reported the finding of a fossilized specimen that may provide new insight into how jawed vertebrates evolved. Martin Brazeau, of the Department of Physiology and Developmental Biology at Uppsala University in Sweden, said the fossil was discovered Herefordshire, UK, in the 1940s and is an estimated 415 million years old.The specimen is the first-known braincase of an Early Devonian acanthodian "“ which is possibly the earliest group of gnathostomes (jawed...