Scientists from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology dug up 75 million-year-old dinosaur bones in Alberta in 1989. They've been studied on and off ever since, and one bone from a horned dinosaur called Centrosaurus showed some abnormalities. Thirty years later, scientists took a closer look.
A multidisciplinary team led by a paleontologist and a pathologist studied the bone inside and out, examining everything from the outside shape to the inner microscopic structure. In the end, the experts arrived at a diagnosis of osteosarcoma–a malignant bone cancer that afflicts about 3.4 out of every million people worldwide. The team’s new study, published today in The Lancet, provides the most detailed evidence yet for cancer in a dinosaur.
Discovering osteosarcoma in a dinosaur has implications for the evolutionary origins and history of cancer. “If humans and dinosaurs get the same kinds of bone cancers,” says George Washington University paleontologist Catherine Forster, “then bone cancers developed deep in evolutionary history, before the mammal and reptile lineages split 300 million years ago.”
This particular specimen did not die of cancer, though, which itself carries implications about how dinosaurs lived. Read about this new research at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Fred Wierum)
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