Most toothy creature of planet: It's not shark
The shark is one of the creatures with the largest number of teeth (photo: Freepik)
While most adult humans have 32 teeth, the animal kingdom is far superior in this regard. However, the most toothy animal, surprisingly, is not a shark, according to IFL Science.
Which creature has the most teeth
Of course, if you count the teeth of an animal over its entire life, there will be more record-breaking animals. Therefore, the category of the most toothy includes a variety of creatures with the largest number of teeth found in the mouth of each at a particular time.
In addition, birds lost their teeth about 100 million years ago, so they can't compete. While some geese and goose-like birds have ribbed parts of their beaks to help them grab and swallow prey, they don't even come close to winning the toothiest mouth contest.
Giant armadillo
Giant armadillo (photo: wikipedia.org, User Guillaume Delaitre)
With up to 100 teeth, the giant armadillo (Priodontes maximus) easily outnumbers the human race. This number varies greatly from individual to individual and is not a world record, but it is still impressive enough to rank it first in terms of the number of teeth in a mammalian mouth at one time.
These teeth help the giant armadillo grind up its diet of soft insects, such as ants and termites.
Great flat-tailed gecko
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Great flat-tailed gecko (photo: wikipedia.org, User TimVickers)
The winner in the contest for the largest number of teeth among vertebrates is the Madagascar's great flat-tailed gecko (Uroplatus fimbriatus). According to the Guinness Book of World Records, it has 169 teeth on its upper jaw and 148 on its lower jaw, which makes a total of 317 teeth.
Great White Shark
Great white shark (photo: wikipedia.org, user Terry Goss)
Sharks are famous for having many teeth throughout their lives, constantly growing new teeth in razor-sharp rows that can number in the tens of thousands throughout their lives.
At any given time, however, great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) typically have about 300 teeth. Not bad, but not enough to win.
Toothsnake
Toothsnake (photo: wikipedia.org, User Lt. John Crofts)
It turned out that the Pacific marine fish, the toothy terpug (Ophiodon elongatus), has one of the most numerous "sets of teeth" in the sea: its wide jaws are covered with about 555 teeth.
Studies indicate that these fish can lose up to 20 teeth a day, and soon grow them back - but even they can't match the world's most toothy creature.
Umbrella slug
Umbrella slug (photo: wikipedia.org, User Sébastien Vasquez)
The title of the most toothy creature belongs to the humble snail, which, according to the Glasgow Science Center, has about 14,000 denticles (tooth-like structures made of chitin rather than the calcium compounds that make up mammalian teeth) lining its radula, a tongue-like organ.
According to Tom White of the Natural History Museum in London, the radula is used by both carnivorous and herbivorous mollusks to take food fragments into their mouths - hence the name, which means "little scraper. In essence, animals with radulae extend a "tongue" and scrape what they eat.
Umbrella slugs (Umbraculum umbraculum) deserve a special mention. These gastropod marine mollusks have a rather funny mouthparts. Like land snails, they have a toothed radula with almost 1,500 teeth in their mouths at a time, and they change three quarters of a million teeth in their lifetime.
