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beavers are large aquatic animals rodents which are best known for their distinctive paddle-shaped tail and ability to build dams. There are two types of beavers today: North American and Eurasian beavers. Both have large front teeth and are known for their ability to chew down entire trees. But what’s so special about their teeth? Join us and discover everything you need to know about beaver teeth.
What are Beaver Teeth made of?
Beaver teeth are incredibly strong because they contain iron, which also gives their teeth their orange color!
A beaver’s teeth must have incredible strength and toughness to chew through entire trees. But why are they so strong? Well, it comes down to what they’re made of, and the clue to that is in their color. If you’ve ever been close enough to a beaver to see its front teeth, it’s easy to notice that they are a striking orange color. As we just noted, that color comes from the fact that beaver teeth contain iron!
Beavers have a total of twenty teeth, including four front incisors – two upper and two lower. The roots of the lower incisors extend into the jaw. The backs of these incisors are made of dentin which, while tough, is not as tough as the fronts of their teeth. This is because the front of their incisors are made of really tough enamel that contains iron compounds. This is why they are rusty orange. These iron compounds make their teeth super strong, durable and less likely to crack or chip. The iron in their teeth ensures that beavers can gnaw through hard wood very quickly without dental problems. In fact, they are so strong that a beaver can cut down a six-foot tree in just five minutes!
Incredibly, the same iron compounds also make the beaver’s teeth resistant to tooth decay. The iron in their teeth makes them both stronger and resistant to harmful acids that can cause tooth decay. Resistance to tooth decay is definitely a plus for beavers when you consider how much they use their teeth. So, while rust-colored teeth are quite uncommon, beavers certainly benefit a lot from them.
Beavers have self-sharpening teeth
Beavers eat a variety of plants, twigs and bark. This means that their teeth have to grow continuously so they don’t wear out from chewing wood all day long. On the other hand, however, they also need to keep gnawing on wood so that their teeth don’t grow too long for their mouths! Since they chew wood all the time, it would be quite easy for beavers to become blunt and ineffective. That’s why they actually have a handy trick to prevent this: self-sharpening teeth.
As we mentioned, beavers have four long incisors at the front of their mouths that are made of dentin at the back and contain iron compounds at the front. The softer dentin wears faster on the back of their teeth than on the front of their teeth. This is because the front is much harder due to the iron they contain. Because the back wears faster than the front, a chisel-like shape is created. This is really effective for chewing through wood. The fact that they never stop growing, coupled with the wear pattern, makes beaver’s front teeth self-sharpening.
The molars of beavers also work in much the same way as their incisors. Once their incisors have gnawed at the wood, chunks are sent back for the molars to grind. Their molars are made of dentin and enamel, as are their incisors (though minus the iron). Therefore, just like on their front teeth, the dentin wears out faster than the enamel. This creates sharp ridges on their molars and these ridges make it easier to grind their food. However, the ridges on the molars often wear out unevenly over time.
Old Beavers Had Even bigger Gigantic beaver teeth!
Another interesting question that often comes up when we talk about beaver teeth is whether old ones? beavers had teeth that worked the same way. One of the first things to mention is that some ancient beavers were much, much larger than modern beavers. In fact they were actually bear format. They also lacked the traditional paddle-shaped tail, with a thinner tail like that of a muskrat.
Giant beavers – known by the genus castoroid – had incisors that were about 6 inches long. Unlike the beavers we see today have teeth that are covered with smooth enamel, giant beavers had teeth with hard enamel edges on them. They also lacked the chisel-like cutting edge that modern beaver teeth have. Research suggests that giant beavers ate a diet of mostly aquatic plants, rather than the woody diet enjoyed by today’s beavers. Together with the lack of a cutting edge on their teeth, this suggests that giant beavers were not the tree-chopping dam builders they are today. This also means that they depended on existing wetland habitats for their survival, as they were unable to alter the watercourses for their own benefit. It is believed that this eventually led to their eventual extinction about 12,000 years ago.
However, if we go even further back to an ancestor of the giant beaver, we find Dipoides – a not so gigantic beaver believed to be a common ancestor of today’s beavers. Studies have suggested that Dipoides had a predilection for wood and cut down trees with round teeth for food and possibly dam construction. However, they gnawed with only one tooth at a time, which lasted much longer than modern beavers with their highly adapted teeth.
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