star Be part of April 1–30! star
Are you fascinated by forensic science? This project is run by a real life forensic anthropologist, and is about teeth. It is designed to gather information about your age, ethnicity and the teeth you have in your mouth, to see if what we think we know about when teeth erupt is accurate. At the moment, if an unknown body is found, forensic scientists (forensic anthropologists and forensic odontologists) examine the teeth and work out how old the person was when s/he died by noting which teeth have erupted, and comparing this to reference data. This data then gives the scientist an age range, which can help the police narrow down the list of possible people that the body could be. The problem is that this data is out of date, and there is lots of variation between populations. That's where YOU come in. We can improve this data set by getting as many people as possible to complete our survey. That way, we can build up a mega-database of ages and tooth eruption and ethnicities, and build up a really useful bank of data for scientists to use in the future.