> We've recovered some words from the ashes, and so we can tell what language the book was in, and where in history that book fits in with the language (comparing those words with other books with similar words), but we can't reconstruct the whole book yet.

If they had other teeth (from the same specimen or different ones of the same species), would they be able to just combine them to fill in the gaps?

To follow your metaphor, to me this sounds like finding different copies of the same printing, same edition, same book and combining them all to make a complete book. Does the metaphor fall apart?