tooth question?

Question

When you get a bone fracture it will eventually heal. How come if you lose teeth they cannot grow back? It does for some other animals.

Answer 1

Then do grow back but only once... Baby teeth

Answer 2

Teeth are not made of bone.
Bone is a living tissue with functioning cells inside it which are capable of repair.
Tooth structure is made up layer by layer by secreting cells which do not become part of the tooth. Hence it is a much stronger material than bone because it is denser, but it is not able to be repaired from within.
Some animals have continuously growing teeth (e.g.rodents) which are great for gnawing; some animals have multiple sets of teeth (e.g.sharks), great for a predator. Just an evolutionary thing.

Answer 3

The tooth, the whole tooth, and nothing but the tooth...

Facts about teeth in non-human animals

Rodents' incisors grow continuously throughout their lives.
Reptiles' and sharks' teeth are replaced constantly, before they wear out. A crocodile replaces its teeth over forty times in a lifetime.
Elephants' tusks are specialized incisors for digging food up and fighting.
Turtles and tortoises are toothless
Narwhals giant unicorn-like tusk is a tooth that contains millions of sensory pathways and may be used for sensing in feeding, navigation and mating. It is the most neurologically complex tooth known.
Horse teeth can be used to estimate the animal's age, and some horses have a form of premolars called Wolf teeth.

For more information see the links below (especially the 2nd one):

Answer 4

Bones and teeth are two different kinds of things.
On the one hand, bones are like teeth in that we only get one set of them. On the other hand, teeth is more like hair in that once they're/its broken they're/its broken for good and doesn't heal.

Animals have a whole different set of things than we do. For example, they can have scales, pouches for babies, wings, claws (made of "claw material" rather than the way our hands are part of our skeleton and covered with muscles, skin and fat), etc
Animals are built to grow all the "extra" stuff more than we do - they grow whole coats of fur with things like an undercoat sometimes, they grow feathers (I know that's bird and not animals, but you get the idea), they grow big, hard, claws, beaks, horns, and apparently have superiority in the growing-teeth department.

Whether its animals or humans, the teeth aren't same same as bones. Teeth are tools, like claws/nails are. The bones serve the purpose of being the frame for a body.

This is purely a guess on my part, but it would not surprise me if the growing of new teeth may have something to do with some "inverse proportion of something" related to the refinement of the brain/brain development; because, if you think of it, children's second teeth come in around the time they become far more intellectually mature/emotionally mature and even physically more refined in appearance.

Maybe it has to do with some slowing down of electrical activity or metabolism or else some change in the combination and levels of certain hormones or "chemicals".

Maybe Nature has designed creatures in a way that the ones who are less "intellectual" or more likely to need to take care of themselves get the better teeth-growing/claw-growing skills, while those who develop into more "intellectual" or refined creatures don't.

It would be interesting to see any statistics on whether people who have a certain level of intellectual development (maybe in all areas, maybe only in a certain area of thinking) tend to be later bloomers when it comes to when they get their second teeth in.

In other words, if Nature "concentrates" more on intellectual processing and refinement it may "concentrate" less on developing physical mass in any creature. There may actually be something to the stereotype of that tiny, child-like, boy in class who is far from mature but is at the top of the class in achievement.

Maybe in the evolution of humans some certain level of metabolism or electrical activity distinguished itself from other animals and triggered the end of the ability to re-grow teeth over and over again.

Answer 5

i wish teeth could grow back. i envy the sharks---they have a constant supply of teeth growing all the time.

maybe somedays scientists will figure out how to trick the body into replacing broken or diseased teeth.

Answer 6

because there is only one replacement set of teeth in humans - the baby teeth get replaced by the permanents, as opposed to the sharks who have unlimited amount of teeth coming in again and again. thats how nature intended it...

Answer 7

Cuz your teeth dont grow back after youve lost all your baby teeth. It would be nice tho, eh?

Answer 8

TOOTH CAN GROW BUT CANNOT REGENERATE - BABY TOOTH WILL BE REPLACED BY ADULT TOOTH CALLED AS PERMANENT TOOTH - BUT ONCE U LOSE PERMANENT THEN YOU DONT GET ANOTHER - THE REASON IS THERE ARE ONLY TWO ODONTOCYST ONE IS BABY AND ONE IS PERMANENT - 20 BABY - 32 ADULT.

Answer 9

because we're not animals....if science could figure it out there
would be no reson to have false teeth....

Answer 10

because we dont have more teeth under our adult teeth