Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

It's a history of teeth, biting and oral venoms told in the style of Stephen J. Gould's popular evolution books, so if you like Gould's books of essays on evolution, you will like this one too. As in many good evolution books there are some surprising stories. To us, it seems natural that we should have teeth. How else would we prepare the food that we eat for digestion? Surely humans could not have succeeded in evolutionary competition if we could only eat mush or tiny creatures that we could swallow whole! But many other creatures have found successful toothless niches. Bills, beaks and long tongues can be more efficient ways to shovel nourishment into the digestive system for some types of diets. There is even evidence of ancestors with teeth among some toothless creatures for whom teeth turned out to be an evolutionary burden and were lost over time. My favorite new fact comes at the end of the book - the theory that humans may have a latent third set of tooth buds in our jaws that we may be able to induce to sprout and replace broken and decaying teeth as we age. Forget the implants and dentures, I want a brand new set of natural old guy teeth!