A paper has recently been published at academia.edu by a Dental Surgeon,1 in which he thinks he can spot the line of the top of the lower teeth, which he calls the lower incisal plane. In a subsequent podcast on JP2 Catholic Radio,2 Dr John Sottosanti also observes the upper incisal plane, the line of the top teeth, as the upper edge of an irregular oval below the moustache which he considers delineates the oral cavity. That this oval exists is, I think, credible, but whether it represents actual teeth or not is much more a matter of interpretation than observation.
Here is a cropped version of Sottosanti’s first illustration photo in close up:
We are drawn to the well defined irregular dark oval, which is between the lighter moustache and lower lip. It comes from one of Vernon Miller’s numerous photos of the Shroud taken in 1978, and published at shroud photos.com. The filter through which it was taken has enhanced the contrast somewhat, and the inclined black line on the right side (and a few smaller ones towards the top corners) are scratches or dust on the negative, but it will do for the time being. Readers who want to know what the area really looks like can look back at my earlier post, “Teeth?” in which they will see that the area is actually far less well delineated than it is in this image.
Sottosanti continues, “Below the lower incisal plane, one can see teeth, the lighter objects in the Shroud image. The presence of teeth creates whiter images than the surrounding jawbone, as shown in a dental panoramic image.” And here is his example of a dental panoramic image, to the same scale and cropped to the same area as the photo above.
The dental image shown is a standard X-ray photo, in which X-rays have passed through the mouth to a plate behind the teeth, darkening the plate where they impinge on it, but leaving it white where the teeth have blocked the X-rays. By using a negative photo of the Shroud to illustrate his point, Sottosanti is a bit confusing. On the Shroud the white patches on the negative photo above are not actually whiter than the surrounding jawbone, they are darker, suggesting that whatever coloured the Shroud was enhanced by the teeth in that area, not obscured by them, as in the X-ray.
However, although Sottosanti advocates radiation of some kind as the colouring agent, he does not specify X-rays, and I would have decided that the comparative illustration above is perhaps only to show where teeth actually are, rather than to promote X-rays in particular, had it not been for something Sottosanti says towards the end of the video. “Picture a burst of light, of radiation, coming from within the body, through the teeth, and actually putting the teeth onto the cloth.” This makes no sense. If the image-making radiation came from below the teeth, then they would tend to block it, not to enhance it, and the “oral cavity” would appear dark on the Shroud, where the radiation wasn’t blocked, and “teeth” would appear light. This is the opposite of what we see.
Sottosanti’s next image purports to show that “below the incisal plane, vertical objects can be seen that very much resemble lower anterior teeth.” Here they are:
There are only three teeth indicated, which I suppose to look something like this:
They are, however, massively too big to be the teeth of the man imaged, as we can see if we align them with the X-ray above, which is at the same scale.
They are, of course, not teeth at all, but artefacts of the cloth and the printing process.
A little later on in the video, Sottosanti says he thinks he can see six or eight teeth “somewhat clearly,” but there is no indication of where they are, which is a pity. In fact he doesn’t really defend the teeth at all, admitting that they’re probably (almost) all artefacts of the weave, but puts all his money on the incisal plane/s, which, in my opinion, are no less an artefact than the teeth.
So he goes on, in the video, to discuss the oral cavity. “Above the teeth, you will see an oval dark area. That shouldn’t be there. […] if there’s an upper lip and a lower lip, they should look the same.” That sound’s like a good point. Upper and lower lips are approximately the same colour, so if the Shroud image were a photograph, the lips should look the same.
But it’s not a photograph. The intensity of colour of an area of the Shroud is not related to the colour of the part of the body it relates to, but to how much colouration got impressed onto the cloth (if you’re a medievalist), or an amount of radiation related to the distance of the cloth from the body (if you’re an authenticist). The dark area is not a space, it is the upper lip, not registering as much as the lower because of the profile of the moustache above it, which distances it from the covering cloth.
However, there is a bit more confusion here. Earlier in the video Sottosanti said that he thought the lips were closed. It’s not the upper and lower lips, then, that “should look the same,” but the upper and lower teeth – except that “what happens when somebody dies, usually, right after they die the teeth separate.” In that case, what we’re looking at is the space between the teeth, which Sottosanti illustrates using a model of some teeth.
But here we can very easily see that the dark area representing the space between the teeth continues for some way beyond the edges delineated by the good doctor’s fingers. The incisal plane widens into the occlusal plane. It is not represented by an oval well delineated all round.
So, in the end, all we have is two lines, representing the top and bottom edges of the teeth, very clearly for about 3cm but nothing wider out, and no teeth to make them. Sottosanti, in his paper, says, “I propose that upon scrutiny of a photograph of high resolution, by someone trained in oral anatomy, with extensive oral surgical experience, a case can be made that at least parts of the lower teeth are visible.” It’s a fair proposal, but I’m afraid that to me, his evidence does not add up, and I don’t think the doctor has made his case. I continue to disbelieve that there are any teeth at all. Others, no doubt, will disagree, and that’s fine by me.
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1). John Sottosanti, A Dental Surgeon’s Observance of Teeth in the Image on the Shroud of Turin, academia.edu, Sep 2025
2). “I Saw Teeth Under His Lips” – Surgeon’s Shroud Discovery, at JP2 Catholic Radio, Dec 2025