3d ago

Found this animal tooth in a creek in Germany. Any ideas what it could be from?

We were thinking beaver but don't they have orange teeth? Anyway looking forward to hearing your expertise.

49 comments

I need to do chores today, so I instead used my procrastination energy here! It's the molar of a herbivore. Here's what I have:
Definitely not beaver. Beaver incisors are orange and shaped very differently and it's far too large to be a beaver premolar or molar. Wrong morphology anyhow - beaver pre/molars are plicated and this is not. It's also not from a muskrat based on all the same criteria but the plication.
It's definitely from a bovid, not from a caprid or equid. Equids tend to have these bizarre columnar molars, and caprid molars are too small and the wrong shape. Since you're in Germany, that leaves us with cows and European bison.
It's the first or second molar from one of those based on the two cusps; if it had three cusps, it'd be the third molar. What clinches it is the asymmetrical gap in the roots (called a furcation area). Cows have a gap right in the middle of their first and second molars, whereas bison have an off-center gap in their first molar.
Congratulations, you have a bison M1!
Cow X-ray
Bison X-ray
- This is golden age Reddit level content right here
  
  I miss these
- I haven't seen a post like that in four years! Thank you!
- That little part of me thinks you were procrastinating so hard you researched, studied and learnt all that just to put off doing the dishes
  
  Close! I went to college for microbiology, but we got a year-long crash course on general biology, including macroorganisms, plus we had a lot of ag students that I dragged kicking and screaming through their courses as a tutor. I probably spent twenty minutes or so on it because I have a really hazy recall of dentition details.
- Wow thanks so much! That's more exciting than I anticipated actually 😄
- Wow astonishing research, thank you!
  
  Thanks! It was 10 times better than normal because I really didn't want to fight spiders while cleaning out the shed.
- What's a bison molar doing in a creek in Germany?
  
  Having a wild time interrailing?

Looks to me like it's from a creek in Germany.
- I love it when experts from around the world provide their knowledge for curious people!
- I'd even go so far to speculate it's from an animal.
  
  It might not be an animal, it might be an African Strangler

beavers teeth has iron hence the orange teeth. most mammals teeth are based on apatite. some animals have other metals like zinc or iron.

Can you take a photo next to a euro coin, for scale?
- Or a banana, of course.
  
  Wrong site
- I don't have it here unfortunately but it's about 5cm/2" long
  
  I don’t have it here
  I assume you cashed it in with the tooth fairy?

where's the "yo momma" answers? I'm disappointed
- be the change you want to see in the world

As others have guessed, this is a bovid tooth, Bos taurus (cow).
- Are these serrations typical? They look quite mean.
  
  Yes, very typical.

Germany, you say? It’s local name will be something with WAY too many letters.
Edit: Relax, folks. ALL languages are kinda messy in their own way. There’s a difference between a good-natured joke and heartfelt criticism. I’m not criticizing anything. Plus, I’m speaking English, which is an absolute dumpster fire.
- English is perfectly reasonable... if you think taking root words from 3 or 4 languages as a core and fleshing it out with words from another half dozen languages and stitching it together with grammar that kind of matches a couple of those languages is reasonable.
  
  Non-native speakers who become seamlessly fluent genuinely impress me.
  
  Is english the C++ of languages?
- Der gemeine Waldundwiesenlangzahn
  
  Nicht aber von Ziege. OP weiß, wie Ziegenfalle aussehen.
- Einhörnchen? (That's squirrel, def not one of those)
  
  Oachkatzaischwoafboandl?

I found a very similar one, also in Germany, many years ago. I figured mine was a cow tooth, although I'm not sure how old it was. Most people no longer kept cows in that town at the time that I lived there.