Wibisana Johannes N, Sallan Ray A, Ota Towa, Puchenkov Pavel, Kubo Tai, Sallan Lauren
Macroevolution Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science of Technology, Onna-son, Okinawa, Japan.
Science and Technology Group, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Onna-son, Okinawa, Japan.
J Morphol. 2025 Jan;286(1):e70017. doi: 10.1002/jmor.70017.
Dental impressions, developed for accurate capture of oral characteristics in human clinical settings, are seldom used in research on nonlivestock, nonprimate, and especially nonmammalian vertebrates due to a lack of appropriate tools. Studies of dentitions in most vertebrate species usually require euthanasia and specimen dissection, microCT and other scans with size and resolution tradeoffs, and/or ad-hoc individual impressions or removal of single teeth. These approaches prevent in-vivo studies that factor in growth and other chronological changes and separate teeth from the context of the whole mouth. Here, we describe a non-destructive method for obtaining high-resolution dentition-related traits that can be used on both living animals and museum specimens for almost all vertebrates, involving a customizable and printable dental impression tray. This method has repeatedly and accurately captured whole-mouth morphology and detailed features at high resolution in the living non-teleost actinopterygian fish, Polypterus senegalus, in a laboratory setting. It can be used for comparative morphology and to observe temporal changes such as the presence of microwear, tooth replacement rates, and occlusal and morphological changes through ontogeny.
牙印模是为在人类临床环境中准确获取口腔特征而开发的，由于缺乏合适的工具，在非家畜、非灵长类动物，尤其是非哺乳动物脊椎动物的研究中很少使用。大多数脊椎动物物种的牙列研究通常需要安乐死和标本解剖、存在尺寸和分辨率权衡的微型计算机断层扫描（microCT）及其他扫描，和/或临时个体印模或单颗牙齿拔除。这些方法阻碍了考虑生长和其他时间变化以及将牙齿与整个口腔背景分离的体内研究。在此，我们描述了一种用于获取高分辨率牙列相关特征的非破坏性方法，该方法可用于几乎所有脊椎动物的活体动物和博物馆标本，涉及一个可定制和打印的牙印模托盘。在实验室环境中，这种方法已多次在活体的非硬骨辐鳍鱼类塞内加尔多鳍鱼中准确地以高分辨率捕捉到全口形态和详细特征。它可用于比较形态学研究，并观察诸如微磨损的存在、牙齿替换率以及个体发育过程中的咬合和形态变化等时间变化。
