fossil equine upper teeth
The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, PA maintains the online Thomas Jefferson Fossil Collection and a web page about Dr. Joseph Leidy. He is referred to as The Father of American Vertebrate Paleontology. You will find there a link to a page prepared in his honor called Extinct Western Vertebrates (1873): Plate XXXIII Dr. Leidy identified the four molars there as belonging to Equus occidentalis. I labelled a copy of his image below left as "Dr. Leidy's Equus occidentalis".

In 1996, I placed a number of teeth in my Hallquist collection.


Two molars have attached bone fragments. The teeth are still partially in original sockets. The two specimens fit together as shown on the right below. They are 6 cm long. Four separate upper molars are in the collection. I bound them together with elastic bands, to compare them with Dr. Leidy's set. Interestingly, these four teeth together with the two just mentioned appear to be a complete set of six. I used information on the Anatomy page of the Equine Dentistry site to label the set as premolars pm2, pm3, pm4 and molars M1, M2, M3. I also learned from that site that the teeth are from a left side upper cheekbone.

You see above three image versions pm2, pm3, pm4, and M1. How do you think they compare with E. occidentalis? Premolar pm2 is more worn than the specimen used as a model for Dr. Leidy's leftmost tooth. My molar M1 shows a pit due to mechanical damage or decay.

I used an Intel Create and Share PCI camera. I believe much better images would have been obtained if I had used my Olympus OM-1 35 mm film camera and a macrobellows arrangement.

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I, Glenn Bowie, used teeth mentioned above in teaching a geology class to elementary school children in 2005. During March 2009, I read online texts and examined images in websites devoted to equus occidentalis paleogeology, to equine dentistry, and veterinary science.

An Intel Model CS430 webcam was used on March 30 to obtain seven images of upper left pm2.


On March 31, an Intel Play QX3 microscope backed by modern qx3plus software was used at magnifications 10, 60, and 200X. I focussed on material attached to a root. One patch is clearly jawbone remnant. The other consists of fibres and particles of silica. The horse was digesting windblown sand or loess when he perished.
He became extinct at the close of the most recent Ice Age.

In order to show how well the three premolars can be fitted together, let me use putty to separate them, and then remove the spaceing material.

It is time to look more carefully at the three upper left molars. The focus will be on m1.

Until this point, I have refrained from using language to describe teeth details. I was trained in engineering and earth sciences. I am completely dumb about biological sciences. However, I must be willing to accept the fact that I am going to be wrong at times. My online geology class has an image in which grains of loess are clearly evident.

The following image looks down at a particular part of the crown of molar m1 where some rounded silica sand grains can be seen amongst other material. They are loess.

Think of the crown of m1 as being approximately 2.5 cm square. Imagine m1 as being in your own upper left jaw. The foreground face of m1 is shown in the next image. The right side can be felt by your tongue. Your left cheek can feel the left tooth edge. Examine the foreground valley. The crown edge is sharp. It can scratch my left thumbnail. If I hold a dentists' pick rather than m1 in my right hand, I can see by scratching the nail that the tooth sharp enamel edge and the pick have Mohs hardness 6. The material surounding cusps in the crown is dentin, or dentine. When the pick is used as shown the dentin is seen to be relatively soft, perhaps due to decomposition. A root image follows. The cement, or cementum, hardness is comparable to enamel hardness.

The following five images show root region details. I would like to discuss them with you.

We are at the rostral corner of the crown's lingual edge.

They are indistinct, but there are sharp promontories along the lingual edge. Are they hooks?

The caudal corner is rounded and has a facet.

Equus occidentalis
From: Glenn Bowie (glennbowie@live.com)
Sent: Tue 3/24/09 9:48 PM
To: bmacfadd@flmnh.ufl.edu; egilmore@ansp.org; wings@si.edu

May I refer to you by your first name, Bruce?
I spoke with Ned Gilmore mailto:egilmore@ansp.org by Skype telecon last eve.
We were both online. He looked at a number of my sites,
notably http://glennbowie.tripod.com/geology.

I told him that I think my equine teeth and bone collection is
significant. In the best of worlds, I would find a way to show
live images using an Intel PC camera pro and an Intel pLay
microscope (USB, 10, 60 and 200x). Ned suggested I contact you.
Would Scott Wing possibly care about the collection?
I am trying to learn proper descriptive terms to post with images.
There is a wealth of information at sites that specialize in Equine
Dentistry, for example.

The collection site included loess. Some of the teeth seem to be
telling us that the horse starved.
yours aye,
glenn

our address: glennbowie@live.com.