A collaboration led by the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and McMaster University has led to the discovery and diagnosis of an aggressive malignant bone cancer — an osteosarcoma — for the first time ever in a dinosaur. No malignant cancers (tumors that can spread throughout the body and have severe health implications) have ever been documented in dinosaurs previously. The paper was published on August 3rd in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet Oncology.
The cancerous bone in question is the fibula (lower leg bone) from Centrosaurus apertus, a horned dinosaur that lived 76 to 77 million years ago. Originally discovered in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta in 1989, the badly malformed end of the fossil was originally thought to represent a healing fracture. Noting the unusual properties of the bone on a trip to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in 2017, Dr. David Evans, James and Louise Temerty Endowed Chair of Vertebrate Palaeontology from the ROM, and Drs. Mark Crowther, Professor of Pathology and Molecular Medicine, and Snezana Popovic, an histopathologist, both at McMaster University, decided to investigate it further using modern medical techniques. They assembled a team of multidisciplinary specialists and medical professionals from fields including pathology, radiology, orthopedic surgery, and palaeopathology. The team re-evaluated the bone and approached the diagnosis similarly to how it would be approached for the diagnosis of an unknown tumor in a human patient.
“Diagnosis of aggressive cancer like this in dinosaurs has been elusive and requires medical expertise and multiple levels of analysis to properly identify,” says Crowther, who is also a Royal Patrons Circle donor and volunteer at the ROM. “Here, we show the unmistakable signature of advanced bone cancer in 76-million-year-old horned dinosaur — the first of its kind. It’s very exciting.”
- More Here
The cancerous bone in question is the fibula (lower leg bone) from Centrosaurus apertus, a horned dinosaur that lived 76 to 77 million years ago. Originally discovered in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta in 1989, the badly malformed end of the fossil was originally thought to represent a healing fracture. Noting the unusual properties of the bone on a trip to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in 2017, Dr. David Evans, James and Louise Temerty Endowed Chair of Vertebrate Palaeontology from the ROM, and Drs. Mark Crowther, Professor of Pathology and Molecular Medicine, and Snezana Popovic, an histopathologist, both at McMaster University, decided to investigate it further using modern medical techniques. They assembled a team of multidisciplinary specialists and medical professionals from fields including pathology, radiology, orthopedic surgery, and palaeopathology. The team re-evaluated the bone and approached the diagnosis similarly to how it would be approached for the diagnosis of an unknown tumor in a human patient.
“Diagnosis of aggressive cancer like this in dinosaurs has been elusive and requires medical expertise and multiple levels of analysis to properly identify,” says Crowther, who is also a Royal Patrons Circle donor and volunteer at the ROM. “Here, we show the unmistakable signature of advanced bone cancer in 76-million-year-old horned dinosaur — the first of its kind. It’s very exciting.”
- More Here
No comments:
Post a Comment