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Science

Teeth Are Horrifying

A cartoon of Dwight Eisenhower from a French poster in 1953.
Photo: K. Nelson/FPG/Archive Photos/Getty

Teeth: We've all had them. This goes for not only our human readers, but for our horse, chipmunk, and iguana readers as well. Teeth can be useful. They can be annoying. They can be pearly and attractive, and they can be discolored and gross. But what they are, in all cases, is a nightmare horror that should be abolished from our planet.

Here is an image of a horse skull that will give you an immediate, overwhelming urge to smash your own mouth with a sledgehammer:

Oh God.

Why is it like that? Why are the teeth so long? Why is the skull full of teeth like that? I will simply never look at a horse the same way again for as long as I live, now that I know that their skulls are bursting with hidden teeth.

You want the whole thing to be abnormal, a freak deformity that afflicts just this one horse and no others. Not so! According to the very good @M_Crouton Twitter account, normal horses have all this tooth action stored in their skulls, and the teeth "will continue to erupt until terminal and they fall out," at which point the horse will have no teeth left, presumably leaving gaping cavities where whole huge shafts of teeth used to be. I would give anything—anything—to scorch this terrible knowledge from my brain.

Ah, but these are horse teeth, you are saying, secure in the assumption that your own human skull is not hiding a secret store of teeth, that your own teeth do not have horrifying taproots buried in your jaw and behind your damn actual damn fucking nose. I truly hate to be the bearer of this news, but you have so much tooth matter in there. Behold:

Remove all teeth. Destroy them. Failing that, fire a cannonball directly into my face.

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