If they don’t know who you are they can’t go to YOUR dentist, right? Is there a National database that stores all of our our bitewings – I don’t remember consenting to that! And teeth look a lot alike on those X-rays – do you need special training to tell one set apart from another?
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>If they don’t know who you are they can’t go to YOUR dentist, right?
Correct – this is typically only used when you have some likely candidates for who the person might be. For instance, in a plane crash you have a passenger list so you can retrieve the dental records from those people specifically.
>And teeth look a lot alike on those X-rays – do you need special training to tell one set apart from another?
Usually they don’t look at the general shapes of your teeth, but at signs of dental work such as fillings, crowns, etc. Not only is this more reliable to compare to, but also it doesn’t depend on there being any x-rays, as dentist record such information in non-picture form.
This is useful because, while lots of people have fillings and crowns, not many people have the exact same pattern of fillings and crowns across different teeth. And again, this is most often done to match remains to a list of likely candidates, so it doesn’t matter if there is someone in the world who has/had the same pattern of dental work as a victim – as long as none of the other candidates for identification are a match. Going back to the example of a plane crash, as long as no one else on the plane had fillings in exactly the same teeth, that can be used to identify a person’s remains. Or even if there were two passengers with matching dental records, you can then use further clues to figure out which of the two it is (e.g. height, male vs. female, any jewelry that survived, etc.).
Dental records are especially useful if the rest of the body has been damaged or destroyed, e.g. by a fire, as teeth are more likely to survive. The same goes for bones, so if you have e.g. a metal screw in your leg, they can use that too. It’s just that more people have had dental work done than have metal pins or screws in their bones.
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