Chapter 4: Teeth Everywhere

At the beginning of the chapter, the passage about"the precision in which we chew" was ludicrous. It was just comical how Shubin explained how our teeth moved up and down to chew food with maximum efficiency and how the upper and lower teeth fit together precisely. However, I started understanding why Shubin had explained this. It's our teeth that differentiate mammals from reptiles. I had already known that reptiles constantly replace their teeth through the course of their lives but I did not know that it was because their upper and lower teeth mismatch causing it to shatter.
By reading this chapter, I found out that finding fossils is kind of like finding a four leaf clover in a field of three leaf clover. There is a lot of land and bits of rubble but only some fossils between it all. It was interesting to see that Shubin and Chuck had looked at the same ground but Chuck found a bag full of bones whereas Shubin found nothing. I also found it interesting that pieces of rock that Shubin assumed to be nothing significant turned out to be a rare tritheledont. Tritheledont was a fossil beyond my imagination. I still can't believe a cold blooded reptile and a warm blooded mammal could have ever mixed to form a separate kind of animal. I now wonder if the tritheledont had been a warm blooded or a cold blooded animal.