Dinosaurs suffered from deadly cancer millions of years ago

Dinosaurs loom in the imagination as forces of nature, but a new study that identifies the first known case of cancer in the creatures shows they suffered from the disease too.

A badly malformed Centrosaurus leg bone unearthed in the Alberta, Canada badlands in 1989 had originally been thought by paleontologists to be a healed fracture.

But a fresh examination of the growth under a microscope and using a technique also employed in human cancer care determined it was actually a malignant tumor.

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

“We often think of them as mythical creatures, robust and stomping around, but (the diagnosis shows) they suffered from diseases just like people.” The findings were published in the August issue of The Lancet Oncology.

Most cancers occur in soft tissues, which are not well-preserved in fossils, said Crowther, a dinosaur enthusiast and chair of McMaster University’s 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 afflicts about three out of 1 million people each year.

In this horned herbivore that lived 76 million to 77 million years ago it had metastasized and likely hobbled the giant lizard, the researchers said. But neither the late-stage cancer nor a predator are believed to have killed it.

Because its bones were discovered with more than 100 others from the same herd, it’s more likely they all died in a sudden disaster such as a flood, and that before this the herd protected the lame dinosaur.

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 the bone with a tumor, which is about the size of an apple.