A paper about the origin of teeth in Science!
A tropical reef near Koněprusy, 409 million years ago: Radotina, one of the most primitive jawed vertebrates with teeth, emerges from its hiding place in the empty shell of a giant cephalopod to hunt for food. Author: Jan Sovak
The origin of our teeth goes back more than 400 million years back in time, to the period when ancient armoured fish first developed jaws and began to catch live prey. We are the descendants of these fish, as are all the other 60,000 living species of jawed vertebrates - sharks, bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals – and countless extinct species. An international team of scientists has digitally 'dissected', for the first time, the most primitive jawed fish fossils with teeth found near Prague more than 100 years ago. The results, recently published in Science, show that their teeth have surprisingly modern features.
Teeth in current jawed vertebrates reveal some consistent patterns: for example, new teeth usually develop on the inner side of the old ones and then move outwards to replace them (in humans this pattern has been modified so that new teeth develop below the old ones, deep inside the jawbone). There are, however, several differences between the two main groups of extant jawed vertebrates - bony fish (and their descendants the land animals) and sharks. Sharks have no bones at all, their skeleton is made of cartilage, and neither the dentine scales nor the true teeth in the mouth attach to it; they simply sit in the skin. In bony fish and land animals, the teeth are always attached to jaw bones. In addition, whilst sharks shed their worn-out teeth entire, simply by detaching them from the skin, bony fish and land animals shed theirs by dissolving away the tooth bases. You may remember how your milk teeth looked like when you found them.
This diversity raises many questions about the origin of teeth. Until now, researchers have focused on fossils of a group of ancient fish that lived about 430 to 360 million years ago, called the arthrodires, which were the only stem jawed vertebrates in which teeth were known. However, they struggled to understand how they could have evolved into the teeth of modern vertebrates, as arthrodire teeth are so different in position and mode of tooth addition in comparison to bony fish and sharks. The research team behind the Science paper set out to determine whether this peculiar type of dentition was really ancestral to ours, or just a specialised offshoot off the lineage leading towards modern jawed vertebrates.
Members of the research team (Valéria Vaškaninova second from the left) prepare samples at the European Synchrotron ESRF in Grenoble, France. Picture by Boris Ekrt, National Museum in Prague archive
With this aim, they turned to the acanthothoracids, another early fish group that are believed to be more primitive than the arthrodires and closely related to the very first jawed vertebrates. The problem with acanthothoracids is that their fossils are rare and always incomplete. The very finest of them come from the Prague Basin in the Czech Republic, from rocks that are just over 400 million years old, and were collected at the turn of the last century. They have proved difficult to study by conventional techniques because the bones cannot be freed from the enclosing rock, and have therefore never been investigated in detail.
The researchers decided to use a new revolutionary imaging technique - synchrotron microtomography at the European Synchrotron ESRF, the world’s brightest X-ray source, which allowed them to visualise the internal structure of the fossils in 3D without damaging them. “The results were truly remarkable, including well-preserved dentitions that nobody expected to be there” says Boris Ekrt, co-author of the study and curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the National Museum in Prague. Follow-up scans at higher resolution allowed the researchers to visualize the growth pattern and even the perfectly preserved cell spaces inside the dentine of these ancient teeth.
Like in arthrodires, the acanthothoracid dentitions are attached to bones. This indicates that bony fish and land animals retain the ancestral condition in this regard, whereas sharks are specialized in having teeth that are only attached to the skin – in contrast to the common perception that sharks are primitive living vertebrates. Again, like arthrodires, the teeth of acanthothoracids were not shed.
Radotina tesselata fossil skull from the National Museum in prague collections. Frontal (left), left side (upper right) and right side (lower left) views. Picture by Vít Lukáš, National Museum in Prague archive
In other ways, however, acanthothoracid dentitions are fundamentally different from those of arthrodires. Like sharks, bony fish and land animals, acanthothoracids only added new teeth on the inside; the oldest teeth were located right at the jaw margin. In this respect, the acanthothoracid dentitions look remarkably modern.
“To our surprise, the teeth perfectly matched our expectations of a common ancestral dentition for cartilaginous and bony vertebrates.” explains Valéria Vaškaninová, lead author of the study.
The tooth-bearing bones also carry small non-biting dentine elements of the skin on their outer surfaces, a character shared with primitive bony fish but not with arthrodires. This is an important difference because it shows that acanthothoracid jaw bones were located right at the edge of the mouth, whereas arthrodire jaw bones lay further in. Uniquely, one acanthothoracid (Kosoraspis) shows a gradual shape transition from these dentine elements to the neighbouring true teeth, while another (Radotina) has true teeth almost identical to its skin dentine elements in shape. This may be evidence that the true teeth had only recently evolved from dentine elements on the skin.
“These findings change our whole understanding of the origin of teeth” says co-author Per Ahlberg, professor at Uppsala University. And he adds: “Even though acanthothoracids are among the most primitive of all jawed vertebrates, their teeth are in some ways far more like modern ones than arthrodire dentitions. Their jawbones resemble those of bony fish and seem to be directly ancestral to our own. When you grin at the bathroom mirror in the morning, the teeth that grin back at you can trace their origins right back to the first jawed vertebrates.”
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