Permanent canines

Why this matters

The canine is the tooth you will be asked to identify from a tray, the tooth that most often fails to erupt after the third molar, and the tooth whose name is attached to a whole scheme of occlusion. It carries the longest root of any anterior tooth, it sits at the corner where the arch turns, and its labial plate is about a millimetre thick. It is also the tooth around which the most confident and least supported teaching in dental anatomy has grown up - three of the sentences you will hear most often about it turn out to say less than they sound like.

The big picture

One tooth described five ways round, then measured. The shape is a described consensus with very few counts behind it; the root, the canal and the eruption are measured and vary by population; and the occlusal scheme named after this tooth is a description of what a mouth does, not a target every mouth must meet.

The 15 cards in this lesson

1. 01A canine is a four-lobed anterior tooth whose middle labial lobe rose into a cusp
2. 02The maxillary canine: one plate, five aspects, and three real roots
3. 03The mandibular canine: the same tooth built narrower, flatter and straighter
4. 04Separate the arches on a list of shape traits, never on a measurement
5. 05Three canine superlatives, and what happens when you check each one
6. 06A root length is a plane, a landmark and a population before it is a number
7. 07Canine roots bend distally 58% of the time in one arch and not at all reliably in the other
8. 08One cusp above means one pulp horn below
9. 09'The mandibular canine has one root and one canal' is a distribution, not a fact
10. 10The canine eminence is a long root pressed against a millimetre of labial bone
11. 11The mandibular canine arrives around ten and the maxillary canine is nearly last
12. 12Clinical alert — in the lesson
13. 13A normal-looking periapical does not exclude resorption
14. 14Canine guidance is a description of what a mouth does, not a target every mouth must meet
15. 15What to carry out of this lesson, and what is still genuinely unsettled

You have got it when

You can: (1) name the class traits that make a tooth a canine and identify one from a list of agreeing traits; (2) separate maxillary from mandibular and right from left, and say which cues are reliable; (3) state a canine root dimension with its plane, landmark and population; (4) say how often a mandibular canine carries a second root or canal, and why that is a distribution; (5) recognise an ectopically erupting…