Animal teeth are a crucial part of an animal’s ability to eat and digest food. Without them, many animals can’t survive, and they often become unable to eat certain foods.
Most mammals have 32 teeth: eight incisors on the bottom jaw and 24 molars on each side of the back. These teeth are important for grazing and grinding grass and other vegetation into smaller pieces so that the animal can eat them.
In the lower jaw, cows have six incisors on the front and two canines in the bottom corner of the mouth.
The incisors are the first teeth that develop in a cow’s mouth, and help pull grasses and other plants into their mouths for chewing. The stiff upper lip and the cow’s mobile tongue also assist in chopping food into tiny pieces.
On the back of a cow’s mouth are the premolars and molars, which are more robust than the incisors. They are used to grind up tough foods that the cows eat, including hay and grain.
Calves are born with 20 temporary (deciduous) teeth that fall out and are replaced one pair at a time by their permanent adult teeth. The earliest of these permanent teeth, known as lower incisors, erupt around the age of two years. By the time the calf is five years old, they will have grown all of their adult teeth.
