I know that humans can sometimes crack their teeth if they are too careless with how they bite, and I was wondering if any animals, which often have much higher bite forces compared to a human, can also break their teeth in a similar manner. I would think that such breakages would also be less of an issue for some groups like reptiles, due to their polyphyodont teeth.
Hi, all predatory mammals can break their fangs e.g old dogs or old tigers. Broken tooth is not a big problem for animals whose teeth grow all life like rabbits, rodents or horses.
Also sharks and snakes can lose some of their teeth when handling pray, but it is not a problem due to polyphyodont dentition. But these teeth 'problems' are not a result of bite force alone. Pray of these animals is often alive when handled, thus their antipredator behavior can also result in braking of some predators' teeth.
There are two factors to consider: force that the jaw can generate and relative toughness of the tooth.
Tooth toughness is a combination of the architecture/material and the shape. Verily, in the physical world, a thin, pointy object is easier to forcibly denature than a thick, flat object of comparable makeup. Considering that the makeup and architecture (pulp, dentin, enamel) of teeth is relatively conserved along taxa, I would posit that the shape of the teeth is the more relevant factor to consider. Indeed, in humans, the canines and incisors are more frequently chipped/broken than molars [potential confounding factor: location in mouth].
Jaw force should be considered as a binary variable in multiple conditions. For example, "Force is in/sufficient for animal 1 (rat) in mouth position A (default closure) to break tooth 1 (right top incisor)", such that each unique set of variables only has one outcome. As your question regards one of possibility, not feasibility, a study of maximal force would be sufficient to satisfy the above query.
Tl;dr: Of course animals can break their own teeth with bite force! It would have to be very unintentional (malocclusion, seizure, etc.) or very intentional (youtube dare, etc.), but such action is very possible, especially for non-herbivores.
Broken teeth are common in a wide range of species and occur in young dog and cats and even tigers, lions and other big cats, especially in captivity when they are fed bones on "starve days" instead of full meat. Many herbivores (horses, cattle, sheep, etc) also break their teeth, especially when they suffer dental disease.
This is no possible. In all living populations there is an automatic mechanism that regulates the force and when somebody produces harmfull, for the stomatognathic system, forces pain, in most animals, stop the voluntary contraction of the SS muscles. I know that pathological conditions or during electrical stimulation of the muscles we can, experimentaly, produce forces that could damage the teeth.
Early hominins would regularly crack (or at least chip) their teeth during the consumption of hard foods:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001363/
Sharks commonly break their teeth when biting prey (or sometimes humans). Snakes can also 'break' their teeth. I have had a common gartersnake, Thamnophis sirtalis leave several teeth embedded in my finger after it bit me.
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