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.
