Dentures for Elephants

lpetrich · Post by **lpetrich** » Sun Jan 21, 2018 10:34 am

Dentures For Toothless 80 Year Old Elephant
The Nevada Daily Mail - Google News Archive Search
Ailing elephant fitted with life-saving dentures - YouTube
VOICER: Elephant has custom made dentures fitted - YouTube

Elephants have very unusual teeth. Their tusks are upper second molars, though some of the older extinct ones also had lower-jaw tusks. They also have 3 premolars and 3 molars per jaw side on both jaws, but they grow in an unusual fashion. Elephants have only one set of back teeth at a time, and they replace each set with a new set over their lives. Each new set grows from the back, not beneath the existing set.

When the animals run out of back teeth, they cannot chew very well, and they soon die. Some elephants may look for very chewy food, like what is found in water. That may explain elephant graveyards -- lots of elephants going to places with very chewy food, but soon dying.

But I can't find any more about elephant dentures than this.

Aupmanyav · Post by **Aupmanyav** » Sun Jan 21, 2018 1:53 pm

And why are you so interested in elephant dentures? Ask Lord Ganesha.

Oh, it is the 'Everything' forum.

lpetrich · Post by **lpetrich** » Sun Jan 21, 2018 2:46 pm

Because it seems like an obvious sort of veterinary medicine. If we can have dentures, then why can't elephants?

Politesse · Post by **Politesse** » Sun Jan 21, 2018 5:02 pm

The museum at my school has two mammoth molars; huge things. An interesting quality of elephants both ancient and modern is that if a molar needs replacing, a new tooth will start growing behind it, back on the jaw, slowly pushing the decaying forward and out of the mouth, and unlike humans, they can accomplish this many times during adulthood. But they can only do this six or seven times before the hormone process that kicks it off starts breaking down, so they eventually run out of teeth as septuagenarians, having replaced them between 4-8 times through their life.

The most famous aspect of Lord Ganesha's teeth, of course, is why he allowed one of them to be struck off. There were many accounts of various detail running around in the folk cultures of India to explain the broken tusk, but all seem to agree that the sacrifice was voluntary.

Aupmanyav · Post by **Aupmanyav** » Sun Jan 21, 2018 6:35 pm

Yeah, that i right, Poly, there was no other way that Srimad Bhagawathm cold have been written. They did not have 'Voice' (Speak and write) software at that time.