Hey all! I am currently pursuing one of my sudden obsessions, and I’m trying to find pictures of animal skulls paired with explanations of those animals evolutionary adaptations, particularly dental adaptations. I’m trying to understand what kinds of teeth and jaws aid in the consumption of what kind of foods, particularly what sort of teeth are used to eat fruit and what sort of teeth omnivores can have. Like, if tadpoles eat plants, don’t they need to chew them?
So far the most promising looking hits have turned out to be creationist sites debunking evolution; Wikipedia of course refuses to go into depth on the subject, for example having about one sentence on frog teeth while still meticulously providing a stub page for each and every frog species, and Encyclopedia Britannica is ad-soaked and keeps most of its articles behind a paywall.
It sounds like you’d want a good comparative anatomy textbook. I’m not aware of any comprehensive, in-depth resources online. I took a class on this precise subject and used this textbook (Amazon link). Since it’s a slightly old edition you can buy used copies for cheap. You should also be able to find a lot of good textbooks at your local library, since this is a relatively mature field and the core content should be similar in books from decades ago.
(Tadpoles actually do have little raspy teeth-like things. They’re just hidden behind a cartoonishly small mouth.)
Obligatory Richard Feynman reference: tell the librarian you want an “atlas of the cat.”
Google “comparative dentition.” Here’s a nice resource.
lazybratsche, thank you for giving me a better search term! I will consider purchasing that book, it’s super cheap.
araminty, thank you so much for that link! It’s not super in-depth but it at least has the sort of pictures I was looking for and it helps immensely.