The common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) actually has fewer teeth than most batsMichael & Patricia Fogden/Minden Pictures/Alamy
BiteBill 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…