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Stuff To Blow Your Mind

From the Vault: TEETH

Stuff To Blow Your Mind

iHeartPodcasts

Science, Life Sciences, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences

4.36K Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2020

⏱️ 43 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Where do teeth come from and how do different dental variations in the animal world force us to rethink our glorious chompers? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore dental evolution and the wondrous marching molars of elephants and manatees. (Originally published 7/23/2019)

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lam.

0:09.0

And I'm Joe McCormick and it's Saturday, time to go into the vault for an older episode of the show.

0:14.0

This one originally aired on July 23rd, 2019.

0:18.0

It's about teeth. I'm ready to bite.

0:20.0

Yeah. Well, let's bite right in and figure out what we're biting with.

0:24.0

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radios Has to Fworks.

0:31.0

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lam.

0:40.0

And I'm Joe McCormick. And if you've been listening to this show, you know we just had our friend Katie Golden from Creature Feature on, I think it was the episode right before this one,

0:50.0

where we talked about teeth with Katie. And that was a lot of fun, but Robert, I couldn't stop thinking about teeth.

0:57.0

Oh, yeah. I mean teeth are weird. Teeth are wonderful and strange and grotesque.

1:03.0

I was actually just at the dentist yesterday for a checkup. And I just kept thinking about just how weird it is that I just regularly go to this place and pay another human being to reach into my mouth with special instruments and clean my weird bone like jaw petitions.

1:19.0

Uh-huh. The outside bones, outside bones. Never forget your teeth are outside bones. They're bones that you wash.

1:25.0

Oh, this is from Kimmy Schmidt. Yeah, Titus Syndromeodon sings that song. I think he's auditioning for like a chewing gum commercial.

1:32.0

But he's actually wrong. I'm sorry to say, despite how much I love that moment from the show, teeth are not outside bones.

1:39.0

They are not bones at all. They're a totally different thing. We can explain that in a minute. But yeah, yeah.

1:45.0

Yeah, I mean, well, let's go ahead and get into it. So yeah, our teeth are bone like in many respects.

1:50.0

Yeah, but they are not bones. So just for an example, bones are composed of calcium, phosphorus, sodium and other minerals.

1:57.0

And but mostly it's the protein collagen that forms the living, growing collagen, framework in bones.

2:04.0

Bones have impressive regenerative powers. You break a bone. It can even like a really vicious break of a bone and it can heal back.

2:13.0

Yeah, also bone marrow produces red and white blood cells teeth do not have bone marrow. Instead they have dental pulp.

2:21.0

So teeth on the other hand are, you know, they're composed of calcium, phosphorus and other minerals. They're harder than any bone that we have in the body.

2:29.0

Really? Yeah. But they also lack the regenerative powers of bones. So if you crack or break a tooth, you're going to need at least a root canal if not a total extraction.

...

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