![]() "The field initiated as a speculation…but it actually is a scientific endeavour now, and we can scientifically test hypotheses, and develop criteria," says Bruce Rothschild, a research associate in vertebrate palaeontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pennsylvania. ![]() The only difference is they have only fossils to go on. But the 2020 osteosarcoma study is part of a fast-growing field of research aimed at diagnosing dinosaur diseases, using similar expertise and equipment we would use to diagnose ailments in humans and animals today. It was the first time a malignant cancer had ever been diagnosed in a dinosaur, and it required a multidisciplinary team of scientists to confirm the case.įor decades, palaeontologists and palaeopathologists – scientists who study ancient diseases and injuries using fossils – have suggested findings of cancer in dinosaurs, although the tumours were usually thought to be benign. But the diagnosis of this particular dinosaur's osteosarcoma – a rare, malignant bone cancer more commonly found in children and diagnosed in some 25,000 people per year worldwide – only came in 2020. Millions of years later, the bonebed preserved after this mass death event helped provide important evidence that these dinosaurs moved in enormous herds. The cancer may have spread elsewhere in its body and it's thought that it was almost certainly terminal.īut this Centrosaurus probably didn't die from the bone cancer – because before this could happen, it and the thousands of other Centrosaurus in its herd were struck down in a catastrophic flood, thought to be caused by a tropical storm. The adult Centrosaurus apertus, a medium-sized plant-eating cousin of the larger Triceratops that lived alongside Tyrannosaurus, had an advanced malignant bone cancer in its shin. On a wet, stormy day some 77 million years ago in what is now south-eastern Alberta, Canada, a certain horned dinosaurwas having a very bad time.
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