How are teeth made?

CrowdScience

BBC

Science, Technology

4.8 • 985 Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

CrowdScience listener Jon started wondering how our teeth are created while he was in the dentist’s chair. It took his mind off the drilling. He wants to know how our teeth are made, what goes into them and how come we only get two sets of teeth when other animals, like sharks, grow thousands of new ones throughout their lives.

Anand Jagatia goes back to prehistoric times to discover how the story of teeth began millions of years ago. Palaeontologist Yara Haridy explains that teeth weren’t designed originally for eating at all, but as a kind of armour on the exoskeletons of fish that was also sensitive to the environment. It turns out that our teeth in fact are part of our evolutionary success story. Biological anthropologist Peter Ungar reveals that we flourished as a species because our teeth are designed to get the maximum energy from our food.

Anand discovers how teeth can even be grown in a lab when he meets researchers Ana Angelova Volponi and Xuechen Zhang whose team has managed to replicate the environment in which teeth develop. He also talks to Katsu Takahashi who has discovered a method for developing a third set of teeth. It’s a whole new way of creating teeth that will change the way we make them.

Presenter Anand Jagatia Producer Jo Glanville Editor Ben Motley Studio Manager Bob Nettles Production co-ordinator Ishmael Soriano Translation, Katsu Takahashi interview Bethan Jones

Transcript

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0:00.0	I was having a procedure of the dentist, which was taking rather a long time and was quite painful.
0:06.9	And I was desperate to try and think of something to take my mind off what was happening.
0:11.5	But all I could think of was teeth. And then this question popped into my head.
0:17.2	You're listening to Crowd Science from the BBC World Service.
0:20.1	The show that drills down into your science questions,
0:23.7	speaking to experts from around the world to extract answers.
0:27.6	I'm Ann Jagatier, and our listener this week has been wondering about teeth.
0:32.1	My name is John. I'm from the UK.
0:35.2	My question is, how do we make teeth? What are they made from? How do we manage to make them whilst we're in the womb? And why do we only seem to have two sets when I believe that other animals have more than two sets?
0:49.1	These are all really good questions. And I think if we had more than two sets of teeth, I mean we wouldn't have to go
0:55.4	to the dentist as much, right? I believe that sharks have more than one set. I believe that sharks
1:00.4	continually make teeth, but we don't and it just seems a bit odd. Have we always been like that?
1:07.9	Has that changed through evolution? I'm don't know. I'm really looking forward to
1:12.6	looking into some of this stuff. A dental examination, I suppose, of your question. We'll let you know
1:17.9	what we dig up. Thank you. Thanks, John. So you want us to look into the origin story of teeth.
1:27.4	How do they grow inside our mouths?
1:30.0	And why don't we make more of them? By the time you're an adult, you have 32 pearly whites
1:35.7	inside your skull, including wisdom teeth, which emerge during adolescence. These adult teeth
1:41.8	replace the 20 milk teeth that carry you through early childhood until they fall out.
1:47.1	But although your milk teeth begin to erupt during your first year of life,
1:51.2	as listener John mentioned, they actually start developing when you're still in the womb.
1:56.1	We actually start to develop our faces first,
	...

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