The 2009 National Academy of Sciences report found no scientific basis for concluding that a bite mark can be matched to one person's dentition to the exclusion of all others, and a 2022 NIST draft review reached a similar conclusion. The American Board of Forensic Odontology has accepted this for identification claims and, between 2007 and 2018, progressively restricted its own diplomates to three findings only: exclude, not exclude, or inconclusive. Whether even an exclusion determination meets a reliable scientific standard, or whether the underlying premise that human dentition and bite-mark transfer are sufficiently distinctive and stable has itself been adequately tested, remains contested between the certifying body and the discipline's critics.
What would resolve this A published, adequately powered black-box study of forensic odontologists' exclusion decisions, of the kind the 2011 Ulery fingerprint study provided for latent-print examiners, measuring false-exclusion and false-non-exclusion rates under casework-like conditions, would give the exclude/not-exclude claim the empirical grounding NAS and NIST found missing for identification.
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