Question: I am following from the: what is the greatist fossil making metarial, which animals have you found with only there teeth?

Laura Soul answered on 14 Mar 2013:

Oh there are loads! Lots of ancient sharks we have only found teeth. There is this one crazy extinct animal called a conodont and for ages loads and loads of scientists were finding their teeth in the rocks everywhere but they didn’t know what they were, then they found this one conodont where they could see its body as well. It turned out that they were like big worms that lived in the sea and had rows and rows of the teeth inside their mouth and throat. But until then no one could figure out what they were!

A lot of mammals are only known from tooth fossils. Mammals are everything that has fur and feeds milk to its babies like us, monkeys, horses, tigers, hamsters, sloths and lots of other things. One of the really cool thing about mammals is that their teeth are very specialised, this means that each different species of mammal has different teeth to other species. If you have a cat or a dog you will be able to see that their teeth are very different to yours for example. This means that when we find a fossil tooth we can match it to other teeth where we know what animal they come from. So we might find a fossil tooth that looks like a rats tooth but is a tiny bit different, so we know that there was an ancient animal that was a bit like a rat.

The reason that we find shark and mammal teeth is because these are the kinds of animals that replace their teeth, so one set (or lots of sets for sharks) fall out and get left on the ground and get fossilised.