About this page

The teeth in the illustration are not scanned from real teeth. Their shapes are generated procedurally from a handful of numbers: width, thickness, crown height, root length, root count, and cusp count. Those numbers use average human tooth anatomy, but the result is still a simplification.

In practice: the shapes here are good enough to recognise which tooth is which, where it sits, the order they arrive in, and how a baby tooth relates to its successor. They are not good enough for studying surface detail, fissure patterns, or root canal anatomy. For dental coursework, use an anatomical atlas or a scanned model.

What the approach gives in return is something an off-the-shelf model does not: every tooth is its own object that can be animated as it erupts, labelled with its FDI code, coloured by its phase of life, and clicked — with no large asset to download first.

Every tooth carries a range of eruption ages, and baby teeth also carry a range for falling out. From a single age, the state of each tooth is worked out: still forming in the bone, breaking through the gum, in full use, going loose, or gone.

Because an eruption range really is a range, this app also uses it as the duration of the process: a tooth starts to appear at the lower bound and reaches its final position at the upper bound. That makes it easy to follow, but it is not how an eruption chart should be read — for one individual, the range states when it is likely to appear, not how long it takes.

Jaw size also grows with age, while the slots the teeth stand in are adult-sized. That is why permanent teeth look tighter when they arrive in a jaw that hasn't finished growing — the resemblance to crowding in a school-age child is not a coincidence, but it is still an illustration, not an orthodontic simulation.

Receding gums and worn chewing surfaces are drawn as gradual changes after roughly ages 20 to 35. Both are genuinely related to years of use, but the rate varies enormously between people.

The scenario in which every tooth is lost is an option you have to switch on yourself, and it is not part of the default view. The reason is simple: losing teeth is not a normal part of ageing. It is the result of gum disease and decay running untreated for years. The order in which teeth go in that scenario follows a commonly observed pattern — molars first, canines holding on longest — but the timings are estimates for the sake of illustration, not a prediction.

Everything on this page is educational and describes the pattern that holds for most people. A few months' variation in when a child's teeth arrive is ordinary. If a tooth has not appeared well past the normal range, if gaps or crowding are worrying, if gums bleed persistently, or if pain does not settle, an examination by a dentist is the only way to establish the cause.