The failure of spur gears operating in highly contaminated media was studied. In fact, the effect of the presence of solid particles in gear mechanisms during surface tooth contact was observed. It is shown that the solid contaminants lead to significant wear in the first few operating cycles, in zones with a high rate of sliding. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images show clearly that the wear is more significant for a dry contact in the presence of larger size particles. Indeed, the presence of contaminants leads to an increase in friction, and therefore raises the temperature and the vibration levels when the operation of gear mechanism becomes very severe especially for a dry contact under the effect of larger size particles. On the other hand, we have tried to obtain a better understanding and a good description of wear debris distributions in gear mechanisms by using unimodal, single distribution models (Weibull and three-parameter Weibull).