These dinosaur diseases, which might seem familiar, reveal how they lived and died
CTV
Dinosaurs, like us, got sick and injured. By detecting these medical conditions in fossils, paleopathologists, experts in ancient disease and injuries, are gaining tantalizing insights into dinosaur behaviour and evolution -- how a dinosaur moved through its world, the relationship between predator and prey, and how dinosaurs of the same species interacted.
Dinosaurs, like us, got sick and injured. By detecting these medical conditions in fossils, paleopathologists, experts in ancient disease and injuries, are gaining tantalizing insights into dinosaur behaviour and evolution -- how a dinosaur moved through its world, the relationship between predator and prey, and how dinosaurs of the same species interacted.
Until relatively recently, however, diagnosing multi-million-year-old diseases from fossilized bones was decidedly hit-and-miss.
First off, the fossil record only reveals a small fraction of the creatures that lived in the past, and those that reach us have withstood multiple obstacles over millions of years. What's more, with soft tissue largely missing from fossils, scientists rely on bones for information. And it's often very hard to determine whether deformations in a dinosaur's bone structure were caused by disease or the crush of sediment over time.
Paleontologists can identify strange structures, bone overgrowths, rough surfaces, and holes or porous surfaces in areas where they should not be without the help of special tools. But the application of medical advances like computerized tomography to paleontology have allowed researchers to peer through rock to see what's happening inside fossilized bones.
