the.com/dentition
Your teeth's resume: what you've got, where it's planted, how it bites.
means The arrangement, number, and type of teeth a person or animal has, including how they're positioned and how they meet when the jaw closes.
from From Latin dentitio, 'teething' or 'cutting of teeth,' itself from dens/dentis, 'tooth' — the same root that gives us dental, dentist, and indent (the ragged edge of a torn page once reminded someone of a row of teeth). Latin dens traces back further to a very old Indo-European root for 'tooth,' shared distantly with words like the Greek odous (as in orthodontist). The word originally focused on the act of teeth emerging, but widened to mean the whole set and structure of teeth a creature ends up with.
- not just count
- includes type, arrangement, and eruption timing too
- two rounds
- humans get baby teeth, then permanent, never a third
- sharks differ
- some species grow thousands across a lifetime
- diagnostic clue
- forensic scientists identify bodies by dentition alone