Summary
Carbon, nitrogen and oxygen as well as trace amounts of metals such as strontium and lead and their stable isotopes are derived from the environment and incorporated into teeth. As teeth are very stable over time, measurement of isotope values can provide evidence of what an animal ate and where it lived during its life. Such information can be derived for extinct animals hundreds of millions of years old. It has provided evidence that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, when and where maize was introduced into the Americas, the origins of the African slave trade, the diet of man’s early ancestors and which bodies in communal graves are local as compared to foreign.
Keywords
Teeth, isotopes, carbon isotopes, oxygen isotopes, dinosaurs