Comparison of dental maturation in Hong Kong Chinese and United Kingdom Caucasian populations

•First ever study to provide insight on dental development through direct comparison of tooth development stages from a large sample of Caucasian and Chinese populations.•Overall, Chinese were dentally advanced compared to Caucasians, but reverse trend was observed only in third molar development. Understanding dental maturation in ethnically distinct populations is important in forensic age estimations and the presence of population differences in dental maturation was highly debated. No such comparison had been performed between two major populations; Caucasian and Chinese. This study aims to analyze and compare the maturation of permanent teeth from a sample of Caucasian and Chinese populations. Dental panoramic radiographs of subjects aged 2–24years belonging to United Kingdom (UK) Caucasian and Hong Kong (HK) Chinese populations were obtained from a teaching hospital. The teeth were scored and reference datasets were developed separately for males and females. Statistical significance was set at p