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Dinosaurs Got Cancer Too, Say Scientists

Dinosaurs appear to be forces of nature in their imagination, but a new study that identifies the first known case of cancer in creatures shows that they have also suffered from a debilitating disease.

A badly malformed Centrosaurus leg bone uncovered in Alberta, Canada in 1989, was originally thought to be a healed fracture by paleontologists, reports AFP.

However, a fresh examination of growth under a microscope and using a technique also used in human cancer care determined that it was actually a malignant tumor.

“The cancer discovery makes dinosaurs more real,” study co-author Mark Crowther told AFP.

“We often think of them as mythical creatures, robust and stomping around, but (the diagnosis shows) they suffered from diseases just like people.”

The results were published in The Lancet Oncology issue of August.

The bulk of cancers exist in soft tissues that are not well documented in geological documents, said Crowther, a dinosaur lover and member of the McMaster University Medical Faculty in Canada.

“Oddly enough, under a microscope, it looked a lot like human Osteosarcoma,” he said.

“It’s fascinating that this cancer existed tens of millions of years ago and still exists today.”

Osteosarcoma is an aggressive bone cancer that still afflicts about three out of one million people each year.

– ‘Just part of life’ –

In this horned herbivore, which existed between 76 million and 77 million years ago, the giant lizard became metastasized and presumably hobbled, the researchers said in the report.

Yet neither late-stage cancer nor a hunter trying to make a meal out of a sluggish, vulnerable victim is thought to have killed it.

Because its bones were found alongside more than 100 others from the same group, the researchers said, it is more likely that they were all killed in a sudden catastrophe, such as a storm, and that before this tragedy, the group shielded the lame dinosaur, increasing its existence.

Lead researchers Crowther and David Evans, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and their team sifted through hundreds of samples of abnormal bones at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, to find a tumour-like bone about the size of an apple.

The team also used high-resolution computed tomography ( CT) scans, a multidisciplinary diagnostic technique utilized in the diagnosis of human cancer.

Crowther suggested that dinosaurs may have been at greater risk for osteosarcoma, which affects young people with quick-growing bones, since they developed really big and wide.

“In terms of the biology of cancer,” he said, “you often hear about environmental, dietary and other causes of cancer. Finding a case from more than 75 million years ago you realize it’s just a part of life.”

“You have an animal that surely wasn’t smoking (a leading cause of cancer in humans) and so it shows that cancer is not a recent invention, and that it’s not exclusively linked to our environment.”

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