I was looking at a picture of a child’s skull (totally recommend, it’s nightmarish and cool) and it got
me wondering: what causes the adult teeth to push out the baby teeth?
In: Biology
It isn’t fully understood and there are multiple answers that different groups of people believe, but the length of the root of the tooth (the root is the bottom in an emoji like this 🦷 – it’s hidden inside your gums) and changes in the bones and ligaments (ligaments are like strings that help hold bones together) in your mouth both influence adult tooth growth.
If you’re really interested in the answer, maybe you could be the one to discover it!
It’s not so much a “push.” It’s more like this: you got your set of baby teeth. Then this adult tooth bud grows (think of it as a seed in dirt). As it’s growing, it’s just growing upwards from its bud as a plant would. As it grows, it eats away (resorbs) the bone and tooth ahead of it (the baby tooth). And your baby tooth gets loose when there’s no more root left to hold it into jaw bone. That’s when you wiggle and it come loose and the adult one grows up out of the gum.
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