There’s a heavy shark tooth on the beach, its surface all smooth. It could be a moddern-day hunter…or it could be two million years old. Paleontologists and collectors wants to know the answer. This is an infographic that maps each position in the jaw to reveal exactly what you’re seeing. The teeth aren’t randomly formed weapons. Instead, they’re precision tools designed for a specific job during a single bite. Knowing their variations will help you confidently identify these teeths.
First off, there’s the big giveaway (the upper vs). Lower jaw. The upper jaw has broad, triangular teeth with many heavy serrations. Think steak knives, to grab the fat and saw up through thick layer of blubber. Down below, not so much; those teeth is narrow and pointy like needles. They’re designed to secure prey but not cut too much… Let the top teeth do the work and just keep it pinned down so it can’t get away. Both types of tooth is necessary for an effective kill. Without the wide teeth at the top, you might pierce your prey but won’t be able to hold on.
How to Tell if a Shark Tooth Is Old or New
The chart makes this clear: one row to the next the teeth changes their geometry. They are not a set of spikes all alike, but a mechanical system. Jaw placement is only half the story; position counts too. Your front teeth are your largest, making them the most important and more symmetrical. They absorbs the greatest amount of force upon biting and therefore handle the most impact from the first strike. From there, the rest of the teeth become gradually smaller while also angling out toward the side of mouth.
Why? Because when the shark strikes, it throws its head around like a madman. It’s those side teeth that help rip off pieces of flesh as it whips from side to side. The back-corner teeth are little stubs now; reduced in serration and size. They barely make contact with anything yet they act as spacers in the dental conveyor belt.
The true magic trick is this: the conveyor belt. Because great whites continuously replace their teeth throughout their lifetime, they don’t have just one set of chompers to care for. They’ve got five at a time. Four lie folded up inside the gums, ready to move forward. The fifth is upright and in action. Every eight to ten days, each tooth rotates forward and replaces itself with a new one. Over the course of a lifetime that may extend beyond seven decades, the shark will have made more than 20,000 teeth. It is a relentless manufacturing operation that keeps the weapon from ever dulling. Should one fall out or break off mid-meal, another slips into its place almost instanty.
Teeth Is it a fossil or did someone lose a tooth? A lot of collectors wonder about this. One way to tell is that when they fossilize, the mineralization process alters them. Minerals fill the spaces left behind from the original tooth, making them dark gray to even black in color. These tend to be heavy in your hand and feel more like stone. Fresh teeth will remain light and cream colored.
Additionally, the height of the tooth multiplied by ten can show about how large the shark was who had that tooth. So if the tooth is two inches tall, then it came from an animal roughly twenty feet long. The reason this works is that the teeth develops proportionally with the rest of the body. Knowing roughly how big the shark was makes things easier.
Another indicator of age is how densly serrated they are. Under a magnifier, you’ll see that young shark teeth feature extremely small (saw-like) serrations; as a shark ages, its teeth becomes more coarse and broad across. You might also notice the tips have been worn or even rounded off, indicating many years of use smoothing out the enamel coating on the tooths exterior. It’s tougher than our own enamel and it’s what keeps these teeth intact when so much of their owner’s skeleton has dissolved into the sand.
The next time you find a shark tooth, don’t pick it up and throw it in your pocket. Examine the weight of it, how wide it is, the serrations on it. In your hand you’re holding millions-of-years’ worth of evolutionary engineering. If you know what to look for, the whole storys right there.
You should of checked the edges first.