History Main / IdentificationByDentalRecords

* Mentioned in the opening sequence of ''EternalDarkness'', but the dental records cannot be used (because the victim's head is missing).

* An episode of ''LawAndOrder''had them discover skeletal remains where the teeth had been purposely removed by the killer to prevent positive ID.

A crime drama trope. Sometimes a dead body will be so devastated (e.g. burned beyond recognition) that identifying the victim by their appearance is impossible. The investigators have no choice but to use the victim's dental records to find out their identity.

* ''TheWholeNineYards'' the main character has a ChekhovsSkill: they are a dentist, and can thus can fake deaths by altering the teeth and dental work of corpses to resemble those of living people.

* Mentioned in the opening sequence of ''EternalDarkness'', but the dental records cannot be used (because the victim's head is missing.)

* The four Ted Bundy victims found at his Taylor Mountain dump site were identified by dental records--mainly because all they found were skulls and jawbones.
** One of the pieces of evidence presented at a trial was bite marks on one of his victims which where compared to Bundy's dental records.

* Mentioned in an episode of {{Hustle}}: a deceased criminal, quoth Morgan, "threw himself under a goods train a week after his release... there was so little left, by the time they scraped him off the track, they had to identify him from dental records". (Their goal is to make it ''seem'' like TheyNeverFoundTheBody, and that he actually [[FakingTheDead faked his death]] to abscond with the stolen gold.)

* Mentioned in an episode of {{Hustle}}: a character in a robbery the team plans to use in a plot, quoth Morgan, "threw himself under a goods train a week after his release... there was so little left, by the time they scraped him off the track, they had to identify him from dental records".

* Brought up on It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia when Mac and Charlie want to fake their deaths. They leave a few of Charlie's teeth in a car. This is not how it works.

* Brought up on ''{{It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia}}'' when Mac and Charlie want to fake their deaths. They leave a few of Charlie's teeth in a car. This is not how it works.

* Brought up on ''{{It'sAlwaysSunnyInPhiladelphia}}'' when Mac and Charlie want to fake their deaths. They leave a few of Charlie's teeth in a car. This is not how it works.

* Brought up on ''{{It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia}}'' when Mac and Charlie want to fake their deaths. They leave a few of Charlie's teeth in a car. This is not how it works.

* Brought up on ''{{ItsAlwaysSunnyInPhiladelphia}}'' when Mac and Charlie want to fake their deaths. They leave a few of Charlie's teeth in a car. This is not how it works.

* Used in ''FullMetalAlchemist'' for Maria Ross' death. [[spoiler: she's alive- it was a ruse by Mustang]]

* ''The Whole Nine Yards'' the main character has a ChekhovsSkill: they are a dentist, and can thus can fake deaths by altering the teeth and dental work of corpses to resemble those of living people.
* ''Wild Things''. Police find some teeth by the beach and use Suzie Toller's dental records to identify them as hers and confirm her death. [[spoiler: Later it's revealed that she knocked out her own teeth to fake her death.]]

* One episode of ''{{NCIS}}'' featured an odd variation: The one suspect in the murder case is said to have burned to death three years ago, and dental records confirm this... but the forensics team, on a hunch, tests the blood type of both the teeth and the corpse, and finds that they don't match. Meaning that the killer faked his own death all those years ago by removing his own teeth and gluing them in the corpse's skull.

* An interesting subversion of this can be found in most versions of DungeonsAndDragons regarding the spell Speak With Dead. In most cases, the spell required that the corpse's jaw was intact in order to function (basically the caster was briefly animating the corpse for the purpose of answering some questions) so a common practice was to remove the lower jaw of anyone you killed and didn't want blabbing about it later.

Sometimes in fiction a character has his teeth surgically altered so he can fake his death. Such surgery is easily identifiable in RealLife, at least in modern times, and in most cases the best way to fake a death through dental ID would be to switch the records.

[[AC:{{Anime}} and {{Manga}}]]
* Used in ''FullMetalAlchemist'' for Maria Ross' death. [[spoiler: she's alive- it was a ruse by Mustang]]
* Subverted in ''HigurashiNoNakuKoroNi'': [[spoiler:Takano, who vanishes on the night of Watanagashi, has her burnt body identified thusly when they find it stuffed in a well. However, she's the BigBad who faked the corpse after all.]]
* In ''UminekoNoNakuKoroNi'', [[spoiler: at the end of the first arc, Maria's jawbone is identified this way.]]

[[AC:{{Film}}]]
* ''The Whole Nine Yards'' the main character has a ChekhovsSkill: they are a dentist, and can thus can fake deaths by altering the teeth and dental work of corpses to resemble those of living people.

[[AC:{{Literature}}]]
* Several LordPeterWimsey stories invoke this trope, though the identification is usually subverted.

* Dental identification is also a key plot point in AgathaChristie's novel ''One, Two, Buckle My Shoe''.
* In Rupert Holmes' novel ''Swing'', a character is killed in a fiery car accident and identified via dental records. [[spoiler: It later turns out that the character instead switched dental records with the woman she killed in order to appear to have died.]]

[[AC:LiveActionTV]]
* Frequently on ''{{Bones}}'', where they deal with corpses in advanced states of decay and/or dismemberment.
* Also frequent in ''WireInTheBlood'', where they deal with deeply disturbed people who either frantically mutilate their victims or cold-blooded sociopaths min-maxing their way to maximal bodycount by removing other identifying features from their victims.
* Referenced on ''HowIMetYourMother'' when Barney says that, given the things he knows about Goliath National Bank, he'll never be fired, but that he might one day "wash up on shore with no fingerprints or teeth."
* ''{{CSI}}'': several episodes, being a long running cop show. For example "Bad To The Bone": skeletal remains are identified as Marissa Cleary from her dental records.
* ''TheBill'' Several episodes. For example Season 5, Episode 6: "Life And Death" a man has a drug overdose after confessing to a murder. He is identified by dental records, allowing the police to track down his family.

[[AC:{{RealLife}}]]

[[AC:{{Videogames}}]]
* Mentioned in the opening sequence of ''EternalDarkness'', but the dental records cannot be used (because the victim's head is missing.)
* In ''GrimFandango'', the computer terminals at the Department of Death scan the user's teeth to give them access, which makes sense seeing as a [[DemBones person's chompers]] are one of the few identifying physical features one can carry over from the Land of the Living. This is used in a puzzle early on in the game, where Manny has to make a mold so that a local resistance group can make a replica of his teeth and access the Department of Death's computer network.

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* ''Brat Farrar'' by Josephine Tey discusses this but eventually averts it. The protagonist is pretending to be a long-lost heir; it turns out that he doesn't have to deal with matching the heir's dental history, as the dentist who could have recognized him died along with the heir's parents.

* This Troper was a patient of a dentist who had a certificate of appreciation on his wall for his help in identifying the victims of a plane crash.

Identifying bodies from dental records is TruthInTelevision, but it works a lot better in fiction than in real life. Many people in RealLife don't go to the dentist regularly (if at all - this is a special problem with the homeless, who are also more likely to become murder victims than the average person), and it's not always easy to find out who a deceased person's dentist was if they were single or elderly. Then you have the people who wear dentures - most denturists don't keep records even for seven years, and the poor can wear the same dentures for twenty years or longer. Worst of all is when the body isn't found anywhere near where the victim lived; this was a near-insurmountable roadblock to identification before the development of the CODIS identification system, but it can still be a problem today if the body crosses a national boundary - say, if it's dumped into the water in upstate New York and washes up on the coast of Newfoundland.

A common trope in police procedurals, medical mysteries, and forensic shows.