When It Comes To Teeth,

I could do with some of these!

as it happens on Tuesday I have a visit to the dentist, firstly for my annual check up, and secondly to glue back a tooth that fell out last week, back to the gumboot chiton, (Cryptochiton stelleri), the above photograph Professor Douglas Eernisse/Wikimedia Commons, it is a marine mollusk also known as the Wondering Meatloaf, the creature has teeth made of the hardest biological material known to man, magnetite, it is a geologic mineral commonly found in the earth’s crust, but it’s also somehow produced by the gumboot chiton and synthesized into rows of small teeth hard enough to scrape algae off of rocks. The top of these teeth is layered with magnetite, which makes them literally as strong as steel, but the root is also incredibly tough, thanks to another iron-like material that has never been observed in living creatures before, santabarbaraite, as it happens there is so much iron in the teeth they can be picked up by a magnet!

“Santabarbaraite has high water content, which makes it strong with low density. We think this might toughen the teeth without adding a lot of weight,” Derk Joester, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University in Illinois, said of the chiton’s unique teeth, although the process through which magnetite and santabarbaraite are biologically synthesized has yet to be fully understood, research suggests that the incredibly strong teeth are formed in three stages. First, crystals of hydrated iron oxide (ferrihydrite) nucleate on a fiber-like substrate rich in chitin, after which these nanocrystalline particles convert to magnetite, then, the magnetite particles begin to grow along these organic fibers, creating rods parallel to the mature teeth, interestingly, this whole biological process occurs at room temperature, and scientists think that properly understanding it could help them come up with new ultra-resistant nanomaterials, where was I when magnetite teeth were handed out?