A team of paleontologists from the United States for the first time discovered traces of an ancient respiratory infection in the fossil bones of a dinosaur in southwestern Montana. The results of the study were published in the scientific journal Scientific Reports.
The subject of the study was the fossilized remains of an immature diplodocid, which was a large herbivorous sauropod dinosaur with a long neck that lived approximately 150 million years ago. Scientists have found that the lizard was sick with aspergillosis, from which birds most often die. This disease probably caused the dinosaur’s death. At the same time, he experienced flu-like or pneumonia-like symptoms: weight loss, cough, fever, and shortness of breath.
“Given the alleged symptoms of infection and the condition of the vertebrae of this dinosaur, one could only sympathize with him. The discovery of infection in this lizard helps us trace the evolutionary history of respiratory diseases in the past, and also gives us insight into typical dinosaur diseases.” told Eurek Alert! one of the participants in the excavations, Cary Woodruff, an employee of the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in the USA.
Dinosaurs of this species have a fairly long neck, which consists of several dozen hollow vertebrae. The researchers analyzed three cervical vertebrae and found abnormal bony protrusions of an unusual structure that could have formed in response to an infection. Thanks to this discovery, experts were able to identify the disease in sauropods.
In October 2021, paleontologists from the UK, Egypt and the US identified a previously unknown mass extinction of mammals in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. According to scientists, then in Africa, about 63 percent of the animals that inhabited the continent died out.
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