Figures
Toothed, but enamelless, and toothed mammals.
Mammal tooth structure varies from toothed, to toothed but enamelless, to toothless, of which the skulls of two are shown here (top: a toothed but enamelless Choloepus hoffmanni, the two-toed sloth; bottom: a toothed Sus scrofa, the wild pig—the top image is 1/5 the scale of the bottom image). A Research Article in this issue of PLoS Genetics (see Meredith et al., 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000634) synthesizes paleontological data using ages of fossils and molecular data on the enamelin gene (ENAM) to decipher the evolutionary transitions of teeth in mammals. Just as teeth decay during life, so do the molecular sequences of ENAM over evolutionary time. Rob DeSalle offers an accompanying Perspective.
Image Credit: Digital Morphology, A National Science Foundation Digital Library at The University of Texas at Austin, http://digimorph.org/
Citation: (2009) PLoS Genetics Issue Image | Vol. 5(9) September 2009. PLoS Genet 5(9): ev05.i09. https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pgen.v05.i09
Published: September 25, 2009
Copyright: © 2009 Rob DeSalle. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Mammal tooth structure varies from toothed, to toothed but enamelless, to toothless, of which the skulls of two are shown here (top: a toothed but enamelless Choloepus hoffmanni, the two-toed sloth; bottom: a toothed Sus scrofa, the wild pig—the top image is 1/5 the scale of the bottom image). A Research Article in this issue of PLoS Genetics (see Meredith et al., 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000634) synthesizes paleontological data using ages of fossils and molecular data on the enamelin gene (ENAM) to decipher the evolutionary transitions of teeth in mammals. Just as teeth decay during life, so do the molecular sequences of ENAM over evolutionary time. Rob DeSalle offers an accompanying Perspective.
Image Credit: Digital Morphology, A National Science Foundation Digital Library at The University of Texas at Austin, http://digimorph.org/