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this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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Futurology
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Well, that's not actually the first thing they're testing:
I'm guessing the idea is to catch teeth that could have developed but never did (hey, I'm missing one that way). Otherwise I'm not sure how they'd control which type and how many show up.
Annoyingly there's no English language link, so it's hard to say. I'm not even clear on what they did with the ferrets.
Here you go! https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1798
A ferret got an extra tooth
Ah, thanks!
So the meat of this is actually the mouse models, looks like. Strains of mice with genetically missing teeth got them back.
They basically just juiced normal ferrets to see what would happen, and they grew an extra incisor as you can see in the images posted. I'm guessing developing genetically toothless ferrets wasn't in the scope of their funding. You can get all kinds of weird lab mice "off the shelf", though.