Bill Schutt (Algonquin Books)
Our evolutionary history bears the bite marks of our teeth. And not just on our outcrop of the mammalian divergence, but across a vast range of animals, extinct and extant, backboned and not, evolutionary development has been shaped, gnawed, chewed and chomped by teeth. Dentition is destiny.
This is one of the most arresting ideas in zoologist Bill Schutt’s Bite: An incisive history of teeth, from hagfish to humans – an engaging trans-species chronicle of teeth of all kinds. It is a book that is as interesting – perhaps more – when it strays off-topic, which is just as well, as Schutt, a bat biologist by profession, isn’t interested in just giving us the tooth, the whole tooth, and nothing but the tooth.
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We begin, enthusiastically, with vampire bats (which actually have fewer teeth than other bats), and move on to explore the distinction between mouth-based teeth to tooth-like projections elsewhere on the body. On the candiru fish of the Amazon, for example, they are located on gill covers and behind the mouth; this isn’t in itself all that interesting, until we learn that the candiru – with a head about 13 millimetres wide – is claimed to use these external teeth to grip and wriggle up the urethras of bathing humans. We don’t learn a great deal about teeth or external equivalents in the several pages Schutt spends on the candiru, but sometimes a science writer has to give the public what they want.
Schutt is interesting and amiable, whatever his topic. His explanations of the evolution of teeth – how some creatures acquired them, and how others, like birds, lost them – are lucid and insightful (chickens, he writes, may have the genes for forming teeth, but these have been long since “turned off”).
There are fascinating deep dives into the development of horse teeth (which had to change fast, in evolutionary terms, to handle coarse, silicate-rich grass) and the interrelation between tusk growth in elephants and their poaching, hunting or domestication by humans. Digressions into mercury build-up in Arctic food chains – where Inuit people take the biggest hit of all – and the effects of snake venom are just as fruitful.
At times, Schutt’s habit of not simply quoting from a source or citing a paper but instead staging a short, chummy dialogue with a researcher grows a little wearisome. Though on the other hand, one of his strengths is showing us science as a living discipline, whether in the form of John Hunter implanting a tooth into a cockerel’s comb in the 18th century, or modern-day researchers battling with the practicalities of measuring the bite force of hyenas.
We also learn that teeth haven’t only shaped evolutionary change but have also been fundamental in our understanding of it. “The fossil record of the great apes… over the past several million years is almost entirely understood from teeth,” researcher Tanya Smith tells Schutt.
The final section on the history of human dentistry might fit better in another book, but overall, Bite is an enjoyable, often engrossing study of its toothy theme. It is also a compelling demonstration of how biological science is done, as Schutt sifts deftly through layers of research, extrapolation, interpretation and hypothesis.
He also finds time to quote James Brown, the godfather of soul (“Hair and teeth. A man got those two things, he’s got it all”), and to walk us through the plot of his favourite 1950s schlock horror movie, . This is as it should be: a good science writer should eat omnivorously.
Richard Smyth is a crossword compiler for żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ and the author of The Jay, The Beech and the Limpetshell: Finding wild things with my kids
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