Do the police just show up at any dentist office and ask them to plug a tooth into the Tooth-Identifier 3000™?
There are thousands of dental offices.
Is there an international tooth database?
In: Biology
Well, if there’s a record on any dental procedure you have done, so a forensic odontologist, and he goes through dental records to get a positive ID.
If you recently had a tooth extracted or a cavity filled, the odontologist will be able to figure out how recently things have been done and work from there.
how they do it is simply by making a 3d scan of the teeth or whats left of the teeth to get a reference to work with.
now what happens next depends a lot on what actually happened.
in most cases where they need to use something like this the reason is large disaster that caused people to get burned or torn up to the point that you cant recognize them at all anymore.
a good example of this would be a plane crash.
In that case they know who was on the plane and they know where they came from so its merely a question of looking up where people are living and that usually leave a hand full of dentists where they most likely have gone to.
some countries may also have databases for this but its not really the norm.
in cases where they just happen to find a random body in the middle of nowhere its usually much harder because that person could be from anywhere and these are the cases where they often cant identify the body at all anymore.
There’s no central dental database like there is for fingerprints for law enforcement organizations.
Dental records are more used to **confirm** if you already have **some idea** of who the person may be based on their age/sex (also something you can ascertain from skeletal remains)
you can compare your JohnDoe’s teeth with the dental records missing persons in the area or other persons of interest
you can determine which body in a large accident belongs to which person, like a burning car crash you already likely already know who was in the car, but not sure which mangled burned corpse is which person
It is indeed very hard to search for someone using their dental records. There are notations that dentists use to say where you have cavities, other dental issues, what treatment have been done to these, etc. So you can technically put this into a database and search on this. But it is not very accurate as it can be hard to say exactly how a dentist would write something down. So you might get too many results or the dental remains may not match the description in the database enough to get a match. Dentists also do not share this information with police unless they have to, they often do not share this information with each other either.
Dental records are mostly of use when there is a suspicion of identity. This allows someone to manually compare the dental records with the dental remains. They can then look at any differences between these and see if there is an explanation for this. Cavities change over time and fillings can fall out. People also get dental care that have not been discovered in the investigation. So in general you can see if the records and remains do not match if there is no cavity in the remains where there is one in the dental records. And you can see how many of the cavities and treatments match. This can help either disprove a suspicion or strengthen it.
It doesn’t work like TV and movies. The police use dentals to *confirm* the identity when they *already have a suspected identity.*
Like if they think a burned body is John Fitzpatrick, the police can go to John Fitzpatrick’s dentist, get his records, and use that to confirm that the body is who they thought it was.
But if they have no idea who a body is, there’s no tooth finder 3000 that can do a reverse lookup, that’s movie magic.
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