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The tough bulk of dentin in teethsupports enamel, creating cutting and grinding biostructures withsuperior failure resistance that is not fully understood. Synchrotron-baseddiffraction methods, utilizing micro- and nanofocused X-ray beams,reveal that the nm-sized mineral particles aligned with collagen areprecompressed and that the residual strains vanish upon mild annealing.We show the link between the mineral nanoparticles and known damagepropagation trajectories in dentin, suggesting a previously overlookedcompression-mediated toughening mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]