Hi

my puppy who is one week short of six months has just lost her top 2nd Premolar puppy tooth leaving a large gap. All her other teeth are through.
Do you think there is still time for a P2 to come through or does it look like she may have a missing tooth. Does anyone have any experience of a P2 coming through later, I have had a P1 come through up to 12 months but never a P2.
She is going to be X rayed by a dog dentist but have to wait 3 weeks before he can see me and am feeling so gutted at the moment as she is maybe the best I have bred.
She is a GSD.

Hi

With any luck it is the new tooth that has pushed the old one out.

Just out of curosity why are you going to get her x-rayed?  It is either there or not and knocking her out for an x-ray will not make any difference?

I must admit that I am not a great tooth watcher whilst the are coming through but try to wait until I want to start showing them to see what teeth they have present :-)

Hi Nat..did both parents have full detition?? missing premolars are somewhat common in GSDs

Standards most often call for complete, normal dentition, but there are many exceptions, the abnormal almost always being recessive in nature. This is why you may occasionally find Shepherds with undershot mouths, but not Boxers with overshot or scissors bites. Indeed, Humphrey and Warner found full dentition to be dominant over missing teeth, and theorized the involvement of more than one gene. Yet the doubling up of recessives has produced many a German Shepherd Dog with missing teeth. That this is not a Mendelian trait is shown by the fact that if you breed a dog with one missing premolar to another with the same tooth missing, sooner or later that pair's progeny or line will have several missing teeth, not just that one. This is slightly similar (and perhaps the mechanism is, too) to the phenomenon of breeding slightly dysplastic or "fair-normal" dogs and coming up with more dysplasia and greater severity than in the parents, as well.