DINOSAUR T REX BONES SERIES

Think of an episode of the television series “House” for dinosaurs. Often it takes a raft of experts in different fields to confirm a diagnosis. “If it’s geology at play, you wouldn’t see any change in the structure of the cells.” “If you have doubts whether a bone is deformed by pathology or geological processes, you need to see inside.”

“It’s imperative to have an inner view of the bone,” said Filippo Bertozzo, a post-doctoral researcher at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels. 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. 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. What dinosaur illnesses reveal about how they lived – and died.What we’ve been getting wrong about dinosaurs.The messy origin and evolution of flight.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. What’s more, with soft tissue largely missing from fossils, scientists rely on bones for information. Until relatively recently, however, diagnosing multi-million-year-old diseases from fossilized bones was decidedly hit-and-miss.įirst 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. By detecting these medical conditions in fossils, paleopathologists, experts in ancient disease and injuries, are gaining tantalizing insights into dinosaur behavior and evolution – how a dinosaur moved through its world, the relationship between predator and prey, and how dinosaurs of the same species interacted. Duck-billed hadrosaurs suffered cancerous tumors, and a towering sauropod in China survived a nasty pus-filled infection from a predator bite.ĭinosaurs, like us, got sick and injured. Tyrannosaurus rex battled parasites and got gout from its meat-rich diet.

Dinosaur t rex bones