You might think, "They are only teeth, how boring. I want to see something more interesting." But teeth can provide paleontologists with a lot of information about an animal. Studying teeth can tell us the approximate age of an animal when it died. Teeth that are worn down can indicate an old animal, while teeth with very little wear would indicate a young animal.
Teeth can also tell us what sort of food an animal ate during life. There are very distinct differences in the teeth of carnivores and herbivores, and many differences in both groups. Carnivores tend to have conical or triangular teeth for piercing flesh, while herbivores tend to have teeth with flat crowns for chewing and grinding plant material.
Carnivorous animals that swallow their food whole, such as snakes, crocodilians and many carnivorous fish, have simple, conical shaped teeth. These teeth allow them to grab and hold prey items within their mouths, but do not allow much chewing or grinding action.
Carnivores that use their teeth to "saw" off large chunks of flesh, such as sharks, tend to have triangular shaped teeth with serrations. The serrations act like the blade of a steak knife, and allow the predator to saw through a large piece of meat with its teeth. Acrocanthosaurus had large, thin serrated teeth, allowing it to bite off large pieces of meat.
Tyrannosaurs also had serrations along their teeth, but their teeth were thicker than those of Acrocanthosaurus. This allowed them to rip off pieces of flesh, and then crunch the bones up as they ate, rather than having to eat around bones that could crack or break the thinner teeth of Acrocanthosaurus.
Predators with one set of elongated upper teeth, such as the sabre-toothed cats, use these teeth to puncture the thick hides of their prey items. An exception to this are such animals as walruses and hippopotami. Although walruses are carnivores, feeding on shellfish, they use their elongated front teeth, or tusks, for display purposes. Hippopotami feed primarily on plants that they dig up from river bottoms with their elongated teeth, but they have been known to eat meat. Their elongated teeth are also used to establish dominance in the herd, and can inflict a nasty bite to rivals or unlucky predators.
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