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Comment by Pica_soO | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered- why is the ivory market not flooded with fakes? Everything is faked in china, this is a valuable good- is there no way to synthesize dentin flood the poachers out of the buisness?

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This has been considered before, but there's a significant risk that it would only drive up the value of "genuine" ivory. It could also make it harder to discredit the beliefs about ivory having special medicinal/magical properties, since people could rationalize "well it only works with REAL ivory."

There is a startup trying to do just that... bioengineer rhino horns, tusks etc.

http://signup.pembient.com/

Thanks for the mention! We're mainly focused on horn at present, but I do mention ivory here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13288580

There probably is but the market for ivory is for ornamental/medicinal practices, which require "real" ivory.

One source of fake ivory is mammoth tusk, which isn't under the same bans.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/04/125-mammoth-tusks/...

For ivory, you would essentially have to grow a tooth in vitro for less than $1500, retail. Technologically, we're not there yet.

Can you prove that ivory is ivory? Why not ceramic or plastic or something that feels like ivory but isn't?

A simple method would be to burn it. If it smells like when you burn fingernail, it probably is ivory.

Have you ever burned a fingernail?

Burn tests, as yyhhsj0521 points out, are done. If the object is made of keratin, it will smell like burning hair. I've never burned ivory, but I imagine it would also give off a unique smell (e.g., think drilling in a dentist office). Of course, as biotech advances, DNA tests and the like will be cheap and prevelant, and those will be used to establish authenticity.

There have been some substitutes developed for ivory, but they're readily identifiable. These substitutes include the tagua nut [1] and nitrocellulose plastic [2].

[1] http://animals.oreilly.com/the-other-ivory/

[2] http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-earliest-plastic-billiard-balls-h...

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