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Ed Yeates ReportingIs it possible, two million years down the road, when I'm a fossilized specimen, anthropologists could look at what teeth they find and know I liked Butterfinger candy bars?
While not that specific, it's getting close. I doubt my teeth will ever be rare, but the now extinct ape-like species called Par-anthropis robustus is. A device, fined-tuned by doctoral student Ben Passey, uses a laser to remove and vaporize tiny samples from a tooth, samples that give up specific forms of carbon.
On a time scale of a few months to a few years, scientists discovered "robustus" ate a lot of different things like seasonal leaves, fruit, seeds, roots, tubers, maybe even meat.
Dr. Thure Cerling, U of U Geophysics and Biology: "This was a very adaptable animal and used a variety of resources, and was not as restrictive in its behavior as we had thought."
While researchers before could have found this information using conventional grinding tools, Dr. Thure Cerling says the laser system retrieves samples while preserving the specimen.
Dr. Thure Cerling: "I think this opens up the study now for a lot of the fossil samples - man samples for instance."
It's not just rare ancient human samples museums have been reluctant to give up for testing, but the tiny teeth of rodents as well.
Dr. Thure Cerling: "We can now do rodents. Before, we couldn't and that's a whole class of mammals that we couldn't do, and will more than double or triple the number of species we can look at."
Rodent species are widespread, each carving out a niche in their own environment. What they ate can tell a lot about what happened to this old earth in specific locations, a long time ago.
Your teeth are what you eat! Remember that and how you want to be remembered two million years down the road.
