It takes both teeth and jaws to make a pretty smile, but the evolutionary origins of these parts of our anatomy have only just been discovered, thanks to a particle accelerator and a long dead fish.
All living jawed vertebrates (animals with backbones) have teeth, but it has long been thought that the first jawed vertebrates lacked pearly gnashers, instead capturing prey with gruesome scissor-like jaw-bones.
However new research, led by the University of Bristol and published in Nature, shows that these earliest jawed vertebrates possessed teeth too indicating that teeth evolved along with, or soon after, the jaws.
Palaeontologists from Bristol, the Natural History Museum and Curtin University, Australia collaborated with physicists from Switzerland to study jaws of a primitive jawed fish called Compagopiscis. The team studied fossils of Compagopiscis using high energy X-rays at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland, revealing the structure and development of teeth and bones.
"We were able to visualise every tissue, cell and growth line within the bony jaws, allowing us to study the development of the jaws and teeth. We could then make comparisons with the embryology of living vertebrates thus demonstarting that placoderms possessed teeth," said lead author, Martin Ruecklin.
"This is solid evidence for the presence of teeth in these first jawed vertebrates and solves the debate on the origin of teeth," added co-author, Philip Donoghue.
"We performed non-invasive 3D microscopy on the sample using synchrotron radiation, a very powerful X-ray source. This technique allows us to obtain a perfect digital model and very detailed insight views of the old fossil without destroying it.Normally, our method delivers very high spatial resolution on tiny samples. For this experiment we modified our setup and reconstruction algorithms in order to expand the field of view significantly while keeping the spatial resolution high," said Marco Stampanoni of the Paul Scherrer Institut.
Palaeontologists from Bristol, the Natural History Museum and Curtin University, Australia collaborated with physicists from Switzerland to study jaws of a primitive jawed fish called Compagopiscis. The team studied fossils of Compagopiscis using high energy X-rays at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland, revealing the structure and development of teeth and bones.
"We were able to visualise every tissue, cell and growth line within the bony jaws, allowing us to study the development of the jaws and teeth. We could then make comparisons with the embryology of living vertebrates thus demonstarting that placoderms possessed teeth," said lead author, Martin Ruecklin.
"This is solid evidence for the presence of teeth in these first jawed vertebrates and solves the debate on the origin of teeth," added co-author, Philip Donoghue.
"We performed non-invasive 3D microscopy on the sample using synchrotron radiation, a very powerful X-ray source. This technique allows us to obtain a perfect digital model and very detailed insight views of the old fossil without destroying it.Normally, our method delivers very high spatial resolution on tiny samples. For this experiment we modified our setup and reconstruction algorithms in order to expand the field of view significantly while keeping the spatial resolution high," said Marco Stampanoni of the Paul Scherrer Institut.
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