The small teeth lining cichlid fishes’ throats won’t make it into any baby scrapbooks, but the nubs have helped researchers figure out how vertebrates got their chompers. Research has uncovered what may be a shared toolkit of genes “common to the first tooth and all of its descendents,” a team reports online February 10 in PLoS Biology. Tooth formation is likely controlled similarly in cichlids and in humans, the study suggests.
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“The genes in fish are the genes that make teeth in humans,” says coauthor Gareth Fraser of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
Vertebrates cut their teeth about half a billion years ago in the seas. Pearly whites first showed up in ancient eel-like fish called conodonts, described by Fraser as “jawless beasts that roamed the seas with rows and rows of teeth in their throats.”