Grasshoppers have teeth like mammoths?!

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]So, we went way out there and I started looking at grasshoppers. And there's a few reasons why I chose the grasshoppers. One, grasshoppers have exoskeletons. So, they have skeletons on the outside of their body, not the inside. And teeth are part of our skeletons. And so, this allows us to look at something that's growing them and develop them developing them completely differently. And the second is grasshoppers, unlike a lot of other insects, actually have um teeth and tooth-like structures.

[00:00:26]And so, over here, you can see this is the molar region and that's the incisor region of one grasshopper that eats grass. And you can see it's just a lot of straight blades that are quite low.

[00:00:37]Whereas this one eats leaves and you can see it's got a lot of high cusps.

[00:00:42]Now, this guy, Eisley, in 1944 noticed this and he pointed out that this tooth was very much like a mammoth tooth over here. Whereas this one was very much like a mastodon tooth over there. What Eisley didn't know at the time is mammoths ate grass and mastodons ate leaves just like the leaf-eating grasshoppers.

[00:01:01]So, what he might have found he didn't know this at the time cuz they hadn't discovered the diets of mammoths and mastodons at the time.

[00:01:07]So, what he discovered was one of the best examples of convergent evolution that has to do with chewing and food item breakdown.

[00:01:13]And so, I had my student Matt use these complex statistical methods for quantifying shape because, you know, you can say something is a box or a circle or a sphere or a cube, but it's really difficult to quantify the shape of a tooth. And so, we quantified it in all these different ways and showed that the grasshopper teeth do confer uh convergent shape to um these mammal teeth.