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An engrossing history of teeth shows their complex role in evolution

From birds and bats to horses and great apes, Bill Schutt's seriously fun history of teeth, Bite, explains their role in both shaping evolution and our understanding of it

By Richard Smyth

14 August 2024

H82G6F Vampire Bat (Desmodus rotundus) portrait, Costa Rica

The common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) actually has fewer teeth than most bats

Michael & Patricia Fogden/Minden Pictures/Alamy

Bite
Bill Schutt (Algonquin Books)

Our evolutionary history bears the bite marks of our teeth. And not just on our outcrop of the mammalian divergence, but across a vast range of animals, extinct and extant, backboned and not, evolutionary development has been shaped, gnawed, chewed and chomped by teeth. Dentition is destiny.

This is one of the most arresting ideas in zoologist Bill Schutt’s Bite: An incisive history of teeth, from hagfish to humans – an engaging trans-species chronicle of teeth of…

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