Macroscopic dental measures in guinea pigs () fed natural and pelleted diets of different abrasiveness: implications for wear and compensatory growth in a hypselodont species.

The drivers of dental wear and compensatory hypselodont tooth growth are of current research interest. Expanding previous macroscopic dental wear measurements based on microtomographic scans of guinea pigs () fed natural diets, we added diet groups with different predicted drivers of dental wear and analysed how measured variables relate to each other. The teeth of guinea pigs fed either pelleted diets containing external abrasives of various shapes, sizes and percentages ( = 66) or natural whole-leaf diets ( = 36, low-phytolith lucerne or grass or high-phytolith bamboo) were evaluated.