Modifiable Clinical Dental Impression Methods to Obtain Whole-Mouth and Detailed Dental Traits From Vertebrates

Dental impressions, developed for accurate capture of oral characteristics in human clinical settings, are seldom used in research on nonlivestock, nonprimate, and especially nonmammalian vertebrates due to a lack of appropriate tools. Studies of dentitions in most vertebrate species usually require euthanasia and specimen dissection, microCT and other scans with size and resolution tradeoffs, and/or ad-hoc individual impressions or removal of single teeth. These approaches prevent in-vivo studies that factor in growth and other chronological changes and separate teeth from the context of the whole mouth. Here, we describe a non-destructive method for obtaining high-resolution dentition-related traits that can be used on both living animals and museum specimens for almost all vertebrates, involving a customizable and printable dental impression tray. This method has repeatedly and accurately captured whole-mouth morphology and detailed features at high resolution in the living non-teleost actinopterygian fish, Polypterus senegalus, in a laboratory setting. It can be used for comparative morphology and to observe temporal changes such as the presence of microwear, tooth replacement rates, and occlusal and morphological changes through ontogeny.