HOW WHALES GOT THEIR TEETH

How whales got their teeth

A MULTIDISCIPLINARY team of researches has married together the fossil record and the embryonic development process to investigate how the whale got its teeth.

Not at all whales have teeth, but those that do, such as killer whales, have rows of simple peg like teeth, each one looking the same as the next.

Whales use this spiked row of teeth to grab prey, but unlike other mammals, whales do not chew.

In a new study, Brooke Arm field and colleagues investigated the developmental processes that cause the teeth of dolphins, whale's smaller cousins, to be different, and tracked the evolutionary progression of their unique dentition across the fossil record.

Whales evolved from land mammals and so arm field and co-workers first went to the fossil record to trace when and how whales evolved their simple teeth. The fossil record shows that, 48 million years ago, hales had the same four kinds of teeth just like most other mammals.

Most mammals have four kinds of teeth, each shaped for specific tasks. In most mammals, there are wedge-shaped incisors, a pointy canine, and premolars and molars with bumps and valleys that fit together like a mortar and pestle when you chew.

Gradually, the teeth of whales became simpler and acquired their characteristic peg-like appearance around 430 million years ago, well after the time that they had acquired an array of adaptation for living in the water.

Next, arm field and her colleagues explored just how teeth are shaped during development. Specific proteins in the embryo cause developing teeth to grow into certain shapes.

Arm field and colleagues zeroed in on two proteins, BMP4 (Bone Morphogenetic Protein 4) and FGF8 (Fibroblast Growth Factor 8) . BMP4 expression leads to teeth developing into simple prongs, and this occurs near the tip of the jaws, where the incisors form. Prior to teeth forming in embryo. FGF8 expression in the back of the jaw leads to development of molar teeth with their complex hills and valleys in mice and other mammals.

Arm field and her co-workers studied FGF8 and BMP4 in pig embryos, relatives of whales and dolphins. Pigs have the four typical types of teeth and, sure enough, the two proteins are distributed in the same way as they are in other mammals, showing that whales ancestors likely had this distribution of gene expression too.

Next, the authors moved on to examine dolphin embryos. Here, the pattern was different: FGF8 is present in the back part of the jaw, but BMP4 is present along the entire length of the jaw, including where FGF8 is found/

The researchers hypothesize that the overlapping presence of BMP4 in these new areas causes the teeth all along the jaw to be simple in shape, like incisors, and to be similar to each other. Interestingly, other researchers had shown that in mouse embryos in which BMP4 is experimentally introduced in the back of the jaw, the back teeth also take on this simplified appearance.

"The simple shift in the location o proteins that influence tooth shape found in whales may help us to better understand how mammals evolved their complex tooth in the first place," said Arm field.

The research has been published in the open access journal PeerJ.