The development course of "laser drill" is retrospected, the optical properties of hard dental tissue and the laser-tissue interaction manner and mechanism are summarized. The research advances in the application of laser on hard dental tissues, such as enamel, dentin, calculus and alveolar bone are reviewed. The fundamental issues of hard dental tissue ablation and its development in the future are described. Hard biotissue ablation with pulsed lasers is widely promising for the applications in dentistry.