Dr. Michael Trantow has seen plenty of the expected in his 30 years of peering into the mouths of patients. Cavities. Diseased gums. Abscessed teeth .Seeing the Virgin Mary staring back at him, however, was definitely a first.

"I was so startled," the Spokane Valley dentist said of what he witnessed earlier this month after removing a patient's crown. "I told everyone in the office to come in and look at this." The consensus, he said, fell pretty much into the category of shock and awe.

The image, the dentist explained, was made by what was under the crown: glue remnants, an old filling, tooth enamel?.All that combined into an unlikely human pattern.

"I think there might be something there because I've never seen it before," he said. "You always trust your gut reaction in the first two seconds and it kinda looks like Mary."

Proclaimed images of Mary do have a way of popping up in the craziest of places. Searching the Internet for "Mary sightings" will quickly validate this truth. I found photographs of Mary's supposed visage on a tree, a banana, a potato and - my personal favorite - a Mary like salsa stain on a restaurant wall.

The tooth's owner isn't so sure. "He (Dr. Trantow) was quite excited about it," said Blossom, who turned 79 on Tuesday. "It's something different, anyway, Everybody sees what they want to see."