Whose Tooth is That?

Smithsonian paleontologist Matthew Carrano explains how to identify dinosaurs from isolated teeth

Riley Black | Science Correspondent

February 17, 2012

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Dinosaurs once roamed in the vicinity of Washington D.C. They did not leave very much behind. No one has found a beautifully articulated skeleton under the city streets—the city’s most famous dinosaur, “Capitalsaurus,” is known from only fragments—but paleontologists can use isolated teeth to take a census of which kinds of dinosaurs were present in the area. In the video posted above, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s dinosaur curator Matthew Carrano explains how paleontologists identify dinosaurs on the basis of teeth alone.

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Riley Black is the author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and many other books. She is a science correspondent for Smithsonian magazine covering fossils and natural history, and she writes about the prehistoric past for a variety of publications.