Why should you take part?

The Dental Arcade game is collecting data from as many people as possible in order to test current methods used to estimate your age using your teeth. Your data is important as it helps us build our sample size and make our findings more accurate.

You could be part of a study that improves our knowledge of how a modern population's teeth develop with their age. To take part, click here or if you're interested in forensic anthropology and want to find out more, our website is full of information and cool links.

Yes! I am willing to participate. Take me to the survey!

The new Mouth Invaders game

The new Mouth Invaders game is now available to play!
Don't forget to complete the survey when you're done!

    

Take part in our survey!

Are you keen on science? Are you interested in participating in a worldwide citizen science project? Are you fascinated by forensic science?
If so, you've come to the right place!

This project is run by a real life forensic anthropologist, and is about teeth. It is designed to gather information about your age, ethnicity and the teeth you have in your mouth, to see if what we think we know about when teeth erupt is accurate. At the moment, if an unknown body is found, forensic scientists (like forensic anthropologists and forensic odontologists) examine the teeth and work out how old the person was when s/he died by noting which teeth have erupted, and comparing this to reference data. This data then gives the scientist an age range, which can help the police narrow down the list of possible people that the body could be. The problem is that this data is out of date, and there is lots of variation between populations.

That's where YOU come in. We can improve this data set by getting as many people as possible to complete our survey. That way, we can build up a mega-database of ages and tooth eruption and ethnicities, and build up a really useful bank of data for scientists to use in the future.

So, if you fancy it, please take part here. This tells you all the details.
Or go straight to the survey here.

Thank you very much!

Hi

If you have used this website before you may have noticed some recent changes, I am Sam a new placement student taking over the website for the next year.
 I have just finished 2 years of biochemistry at the University of Huddersfield and I am taking a year out to get people into citizen science and try our survey. Although I am a Biochemistry student I have an interest in the field of forensic and hope to move onto toxicology.
The aim of the project this year for me is to gain enough responses (about 1000) to the website so I can produce an article and do statistical tests to see if a modern populations dental eruption is significantly different to the populations originally tested by Uberlaker.

Hope you enjoy the changes.

Take part in our survey!

Are you keen on science? Are you interested in participating in a worldwide citizen science project? Are you fascinated by forensic science?
If so, you've come to the right place!

This project is run by a real life forensic anthropologist, and is about teeth. It is designed to gather information about your age, ethnicity and the teeth you have in your mouth, to see if what we think we know about when teeth erupt is accurate. At the moment, if an unknown body is found, forensic scientists (like forensic anthropologists and forensic odontologists) examine the teeth and work out how old the person was when s/he died by noting which teeth have erupted, and comparing this to reference data. This data then gives the scientist an age range, which can help the police narrow down the list of possible people that the body could be. The problem is that this data is out of date, and there is lots of variation between populations.

That's where YOU come in. We can improve this data set by getting as many people as possible to complete our survey. That way, we can build up a mega-database of ages and tooth eruption and ethnicities, and build up a really useful bank of data for scientists to use in the future.

So, if you fancy it, please take part here. This tells you all the details.
Or go straight to the survey here.

Thank you very much!

Welcome

Welcome to The Dental Arcade Game, a new Citizen Science project invented by the Forensic Anthropology Research Group at the University of Huddersfield.

The aim of the project is to improve the existing reference data about the ages at which different teeth erupt. Currently, dental eruption data is used to help age estimation in unknown human remains or living asylum seekers or refugees without accurate documentation. But, the reference data relied on at the moment is based on a very small study of a specific population, which is not necessarily representative of modern populations.

In addition, there is more and more anecdotal evidence that age-related dental eruption is changing. For example, an increasing number of young people are reporting that their third molars (wisdom teeth) have not erupted by the age of 25 years old, which is potentially significant for age estimation from dental eruption.

With your help, we would like to build on the existing data by carefully gathering details of participants' age and the extent of dental eruption, from as many people of as many ages and ethnic ancestries as possible.

With enough participants and enough quality data, we should be able to improve the existing data and provide more accurate, representative reference data to aid age estimation in modern forensic cases.