Morphological changes in human and animal enamel rods with heating--especially limits in temperature allowing discrimination between human and animal teeth.

Little has been revealed about making discrimination between human and animal using a piece of tooth found in a burned cadaver. From the viewpoint of forensic dental medicine, it is a theme no less valuable. This experimental study was attempted for this reason. Teeth from an individual body of human, monkey, dog, rabbit and rat were heated in turn on the muffle furnace. The heating temperatures were from 200 degrees C to 1,000 degrees C in time spans of 5, 30 and 60 minutes. After heating, each tooth and its control were observed by a scanning electron microscope (magnifying power: 3,500 x or 3,600 x). At heating temperature of 500 degrees C or 600 degrees C, enamel starts to come off in lumps and cracks appear in the enamel rods. The arcaded form in human and monkey, hexagon in dog, elongated chain in rabbit, rows of short, diagonal parallel lines equally directed at every other row in rat--these basic morphological features of the enamel rods--are retained till the heat reaches 700 degrees C. The enamel rods in monkey yield to heat more easily than those in human. At 600 degrees C many cracks appear and deformation of the arcaded form starts. With heating of 5 minutes at 800 degrees C the outline of the pattern is obscured. Human and animal teeth get varied forms of cracks in the enamel rods with heating more than 5 minutes at 800 degrees C. The structure of the enamel rods is broken and morphological characteristics are lost. This makes discrimination of human and animal quite difficult.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)