The tooth system of predators is adapted to kill and tear the victim to pieces. Molar and pre molar teeth (sometimes called buccal teeth) usually have a sharp cutting surface that allows them to quickly cut prey.
Animal cheek teeth
It is interesting that, for example, in representatives of the bear family, many dogs and some marten, whose diet, in addition to animal food, also includes plant foods, cheek teeth are less sharp than those of cats that eat exclusively animal impoverishment.
The big panda, or bamboo bear, although it belongs to the order of carnivores and is a relative of raccoons and bears, uses only plant food - bamboo shoots. Her teeth, well adapted for chewing and grinding of plant mass, have a wide flattened surface.
Most molars and jaw muscles are developed in hyenas, which allows them to easily bite the bones of large animals. Hyenas not only prey on various game, but do not disdain carrion and eat corpses of elephants, rhinos, buffalos. But the front teeth - incisors, which play an insignificant role in catching and eating prey, are small for all predators.
Herbs of herbivores
In contrast, in many herbivorous animals - rodents, most ungulates, elephants, and others - fangs are often absent, because they usually do not have special significance for obtaining food and also interfere with its chewing.In their place there are voids called diastems. Cheek teeth have a flattened wide surface, playing the role of a kind of millstone for grinding and grinding of plant fibers. Fangs survived only in some herbivorous animals.
Musk deer, a hornless deer, the smallest representative of the deer family in Russia, living in Siberia and the Far East, and deer, common in tropical countries, have well-developed fangs used by males as a “tournament weapon”. Musk deer, in addition, using fangs collects tree lichens from branches and tree trunks - their favorite food. They help hippos not only to protect themselves from predators, but also to obtain algae from the bottom of reservoirs.
Herbs of herbivores
Usually large and sharp, very useful for collecting food, they are especially strongly developed in rodents and hare-like (hares, rabbits, pikas-senostavost). These animals can chew not only succulent food, fruits and grain, but also gnaw wood. It is worth remembering the huge trees that beavers make for the construction of dams and harvesting branch feed, using instead of an ax and a saw only sharp, long bright orange incisors.
The incisors of rodents and harebirds not only grow all their lives, but also sharpen themselves as they are erased. The lack of roughage in the diet of such animals can lead to excessive growth and curvature of the incisors, the inability to eat food and to death from starvation. A similar phenomenon is often observed when these animals are kept in captivity.In zoos, rodents are always given branches and small trunks of young trees so that they can grind their fast-growing front teeth. Fans of guinea pigs and hamsters sometimes have the same problem, and therefore sometimes it is necessary to save the animal's life by sawing over its excessively grown incisors.
Elephant tusks
Elephant tusks are also upper incisorsonly heavily modified. Among other things, they help elephants break trees to get to the thick and tender upper branches, and are also a formidable weapon in fights.
