Welcome to the Dental Morphological Database (DeMoDa)

DeMoDa is a database of scores that characterize human dental variation observed by dental anthropologists for tens of thousands of human skeletal remains. Dental Anthropology formed as a discipline to quantify this morphological variation to study population dynamics, such as migration and ancestry. DeMoDa has been developed and is supported by the European Research Council’s Advanced Grant Tied2Teeth, grant agreement ID 101054659 awarded to Leslea J. Hlusko. The aim is to preserve these large historical datasets in order to facilitate the study of biology and microevolution.

The scores in DeMoDa are based on the Arizona State University Dental Anthropology System, commonly referred to as ASUDAS For now, DeMoDa only contains data collected over the last 50 years by Christy G. Turner II, G. Richard Scott, and Tsunehiko Hanihara.

DeMoDa includes a public data-exploratory mode that can be used to visualize how various dental anthropological traits vary globally.

Research access to the scores in DeMoDa is under development, as the Advisory Council works to establish policies and procedures to ensure that these data are made available following current standards of Open Science and a careful consideration of the ethical issues surrounding these type of data. If you are a data collector interested in gaining access to these data in the future, please create an account and we will keep you updated as this project develops.

Advisory Committee:

• Project Director, Leslea J. Hlusko
• Scientific Integrity Advisor, G. Richard Scott
• Accessibility and Ethics Advisor, Marin Pilloud
• Project Developer, Marina Martínez de Pinillos González
• Project Developer, Mario Modesto Mata
• Dental Anthropology Association President, Kathleen Paul
• Committee members:
  • Miguel Delgado
  • Joel Irish
  • Osamo Kondo
  • María Martinón Torres
  • Hannes Rathmann
  • Hugo Reyes Centeno