Dental Age Revisited

Tooth formation spans childhood, with hard tissue formation beginning during the first trimester in utero, continuing during infancy up to adulthood, and ends with maturation of the root apices of the third permanent molars. This long duration makes developing teeth a very useful indicator of maturation in the clinical setting and estimator of age of minors who lack official identification and/or seek asylum, forensic identification and for immature skeletal remains obtained from archaeology contexts. Measuring tooth formation is complex and differs to other maturing body systems, and some knowledge of the difficulties and challenges of different methods is needed to appropriately estimate age. This chapter builds on work by Scheuer and Black (2000), and is divided into two sections, quantifying dental formation and estimating age. Each section includes definitions, descriptions of difficulties, how to measure growth and maturation of teeth and the dentition, how to estimate age from growth and maturation references, some comparison between methods and finally recommendations