In cases where a body is found, how do they identify them only with dental records? E.g. all my dental work is done in my home country and I live in a different country. How will this different country know who I am by my fillings etc?
In: Biology
> …how do they identify them only with dental records?
They would first need to suspect someone is missing, and have a good idea who it might be. They then go ask that person’s dentist for x-rays to compare the teeth to.
There is not some massive shared dental database to identify random bodies with completely unknown people.
They wouldn’t, unless they had a really good idea where you were from and could contact dentists there and compare your x-rays with the ones they take.
Dental records only work when you have a general idea of the location someone is from and they can contact dentists in order to compare x-rays.
It doesn’t work like in TV and movies where they can identify a body by dental records alone.
In real life, police use dental records to CONFIRM an identity they already suspect, by getting records from that specific person’s dentist.
Eg if police find a body and think it might be Dave, a hiker that went missing in the area a year ago, they go to Dave’s dentist and get records of his teeth and dental work. Then if the body’s teeth and fillings match his dentist’s records, the police can then confidently say “ok yes this is Dave’s body we found”.
If the police found a body they suspected was you, they’d contact your dentist in your home country (if they could find who that was) and compare their records with the body. But again, **they have to already suspect it was you based on some other evidence first**. If you flew to a random country, stole a car, drove out into the middle of nowhere, hiked for a few hours then died, your teeth would be no help in identifying your body. Unless you had some ID in your pocket, in which case they’d try and find your dentist.
It is a movie/tv plot device for the most part, that isn’t realistic for the most part but may have some vasis in reality. There is no warehouse filled with dental records the police can go to.
If remains are found and the Police have some clue who it is and that person went to a dentist recently and the Police can find that dentist and the dentist has some saved X-rays, then they can see if there is a match.
However if remains are found and the Police have no who the person is dental records won’t help.
There’s no massive dental records database along the lines of what we have for fingerprints (which is also limited) that you could search when you have an unidentified body. Realistically what happens is when a body is found and they have reason to believe it could be a particular person, they would contact that person’s family/dentist and ask for their most recent records. Some realistic examples:
There is a plan crash and the victims are too disfigured to be identified, but you have the manifest so you know who was on the plane. You get the dental records of that specific group of people to aid in identification.
A body is found and it is a possible match for one or more missing persons. You get the dental records for those specific missing persons for comparison.
I guess you are just screwed if you have dentures right? Or are the jawbones different enough to make a difference?
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