Teeth are abundant in fossil sites because of their composition. Their growth follows very characteristic patterns and rhythms that provide a great deal of information about individuals and populations. The National Center for Research on Human Evolution (CENIEH), houses the Ratón Pérez Collection, the largest collection of baby teeth in the world, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary. We talked to Marina Martínez de Pinillos, head of the collection.

Postdoctoral researcher within the ERC project “Tied2Teeth”, led by Leslea J. Hlusko at the National Center for Research on Human Evolution (CENIEH). Since 2014, she has been in charge of the scientific coordination of the CENIEH project “Ratón Pérez Collection”, an initiative in which the CSIC Delegation in Galicia, through its Scientific Culture Unit, has participated since 2019.

The dental tissue proportions of human permanent canines are one of only a few sexually dimorphic features that are present in childhood, and therefore offer the opportunity to estimate the sex of immature individuals. This work aims to evaluate for the first time the degree of sexual dimorphism ‍in the three-dimensional (3D) measurements of deciduous canine dental tissues, to assess their potential in sexual assessment.The results obtained in this study, which employed techniques of virtual ant...