Fossil dental exams reveal how tusks first evolved

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A wide variety of animals have tusks, from elephants and walruses to five-pound, guinea pig-looking critters called hyraxes. But one thing tusked animals have in common is that they're all mammals—there are no known fish, reptiles, or birds with tusks. In a new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, paleontologists traced the first tusks back to ancient mammal relatives that lived before the dinosaurs, and to do so, they had to define what makes a tusk a tusk in the first place.

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