A photograph of a child’s skull, with several rows of teeth embedded in its jaw, has been widely circulated on the Internet. We decided to check whether the photograph correctly reflects human anatomy.
Information And entertaining portals publish this and similar photographs of a child’s skull with several rows of teeth; similar photographs are sometimes included in collections incredible things. The image is also being shared by social media users (“VKontakte", Facebook*, X), blogging platforms And video hosting sites, sites with jokes And memes.
Like some other mammals, humans use two sets of teeth throughout their lives—the so-called dairy and indigenous. A child’s milk teeth begin to form in the womb; from six months of age they begin to erupt, and by the age of three, children usually have fully grown 20 milk teeth. At about six years old they start fall out and are replaced by molars that have been developing in the jaw since birth. On average, by the age of 21, a person has grown a full dentition of 32 teeth (although wisdom teeth sometimes do not erupt; in this case, 28 teeth remain, which is also considered normal).
Baby teeth fall out due to the fact that under the pressure of the molars sitting in the jaw, their roots dissolve. Nevertheless, sometimes a molar, for one reason or another, does not exert the necessary pressure on its “predecessor” and because of this it may erupt incorrectly - in the wrong place, at the wrong angle, in the second row (the so-called shark teeth) etc. To avoid the formation of malocclusion, dentists sometimes recommend removal of a baby tooth, even if it has not yet begun to loosen, but signs of the imminent eruption of a molar already exist. So these permanent teeth are already formed in the jaw by the age of six, and do not begin to develop after the baby teeth fall out.
“Verified” was unable to find the original source of the widely circulated photograph, but there is no reason to doubt its reality, even if it is not a real skull, but a reconstruction. The veracity of the photograph is indirectly supported by the fact that it meets on many specialized dental portals. Before eruption, the molars wait in the wings inside the jaw - approximately as shown in the photo. In the period immediately before and during the change of teeth, the jaw, indeed, looks in a similar way.
The rudiments of molar teeth can be seen on illustrations (for example, in scientific works of dental specialists) or on x-rays in the relevant literature (for example, in the manual “Histology and embryology for dental hygiene"), and these images are not as shocking as those spread on the Internet. However, in the collections of some museums, such as the Hunterian Museum of Anatomical Specimens in the UK, also display real children's skulls - the arrangement of the teeth in the jaw looks very similar to the photo being verified.
Thus, molars, which are formed from birth and usually begin to erupt only at the age of six, are developing in the jaw all this time. Therefore, we can conclude that the image that has gone viral is not a photomontage or some kind of pathology - this is approximately what a child’s skull looks like with the dentition not yet replaced.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Cover photo: Fishki.net
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