The diagnosis of an aggressive malignant bone cancer, an osteosarcoma, for the first time in a dinosaur has been possible thanks to the collaboration led by the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and McMaster University, in Canada.
The finding has been published in the journal The Lancet Oncology. To achieve this, a team of multidisciplinary specialists and medical professionals from fields including pathology, radiology, orthopedic surgery and paleopathology was brought together.
Osteosarcoma
Originally discovered in Alberta's Dinosaur Provincial Park in 1989, the cancerous bone in question is the fibula of a Centrosaurus apertus, a horned dinosaur that lived long ago. between 76 and 77 million years. Originally, the malformed end of the fossil had been believed to represent a healing fracture.
After carefully examining, documenting and shaping the bone, the team performed a high-resolution computed tomography (CT) scan. They then thinly sectioned the fossil bone and examined it under a microscope to evaluate it at the bone cellular level. As explained Mark Crowther, Professor of Pathology and Molecular Medicine at McMaster University:
Diagnosing aggressive cancer like this in dinosaurs has been elusive and requires medical expertise and multiple levels of analysis to properly identify it. Here, we show the unmistakable signature of advanced bone cancer in a 76-million-year-old horned dinosaur, the first of its kind.
The fact that this herbivorous dinosaur lived in a large protective herd may have allowed him to survive longer than normal with such a devastating disease. This study aims to establish a new standard for the diagnosis of unclear diseases in dinosaur fossils and opens the door to more precise and confident diagnoses.
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The news
For the first time, malignant cancer has been diagnosed in a dinosaur
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.