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New Dinosaur News - 14/2/2020
A Rare Human Disease Found Hidden in an Ancient Dinosaur Tail Still Plagues Us Today
PETER DOCKRILL12 FEB 2020
It lived in a place we now call Alberta, Canada, but this was in an ancient time, long before any names existed.
It was a young hadrosaur, a giant 'duck-billed' herbivore, and something was wrong with it. We don't know what killed this dinosaur, but at some point, it swished its long, heavy tail for the last time, lay down on the prairie, and died.
Today – at least 66 million years later – all that is known to remain of this magnificent creature are 11 fossilised bone segments from that ancient tail, and scientists have discovered something pretty incredible embedded inside them.
Of the 11 pieces of tail vertebrae recovered, eight segments exhibited various pathological conditions, with some featuring "unusual lesions" never before seen in dinosaurs.
Now, many millions of years after the hadrosaur's death, the nature of its strange affliction has finally been diagnosed.
"There were large cavities in two of the vertebrae segments," explains evolutionary anatomist Hila May from Tel Aviv University in Israel.
"They were extremely similar to the cavities produced by tumours associated with the rare disease Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH) that still exists today in humans."
In a new study, an international team used micro-CT scanning to investigate these mysterious cavities in extremely fine detail.
The analysis confirmed the researchers' suspicions, indicating that this rare form of cancer has existed on Earth for at least 66 million years, when the Late Cretaceous epoch ended.
"We scanned the dinosaur vertebrae and created a computerised 3D reconstruction of the tumour and the blood vessels that fed it," May says.
"The micro and macro analyses confirmed that it was, in fact, LCH. This is the first time this disease has been identified in a dinosaur."
As the researchers explain in their study, this isn't the first time LCH has been determined in other kinds of animals, with previous research suggesting similar pathology in tree shrews and tigers.
But we've never seen it in the fossil record before – nor had the means of identifying it like this.
Langerhans cell histiocytosis is a rare kind of cancer where excess immune system cells build up, forming tumours called granulomas. The disease usually affects young children, and while the vast majority of patients who experience LCH recover, the condition causes pain and swelling.
The exact causes of LCH remain a matter of debate, but with every new piece of evidence we find, we learn more the pathogenesis of this rare, and seemingly very ancient disease.
Even knowing a long-gone dinosaur was afflicted by it over 60 million years ago could be important for finding a treatment, researchers say.
"Ultimately, the goal of such studies is to understand the real cause of these illnesses and what evolutionary mechanisms allowed them to develop and survive," palaeopathologist Israel Hershkovitz from Tel Aviv University, who assisted in the study, told Haaretz.
"Perhaps if we understand a disease's underlying mechanisms we can treat its causes more effectively, instead of focusing on the symptoms, as modern medicine tends to do."
The findings are reported in Scientific Reports.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scienti...dinosaur-bonesDinosaurs Were Warm-blooded, Groundbreaking Study Finds
Just like the birds that descended from them, and like us, dinosaurs could regulate body temperature, paleothermometrists conclude from analyzing eggshells of three major dinosaur groups
Feb 14, 2020 7:00 PM
Ceratosaurus and Stegosaurus dinosaurs: Warm-bloodedRaul Lunia / Novapix / Leemage /
Dinosaurs were warm-blooded, a groundbreaking study based on analysis of eggs laid in a chilly climate has ruled once and for all.
It had been theorized that dinosaurs could regulate their body temperature above that of the ambient environment, like birds and mammals do. Now, using a "clumped isotope" technique to deduce the internal body temperature of mother dinosaurs in three distinct dinosaur groups, the team has shown that they really were warm-blooded, with internal temperatures similar to birds: between 35 to 40 degrees Celsius.
Evidently warm-bloodedness was the ancestral condition for Dinosauria, concludes the team headed by Prof. Hagit Affek at Hebrew University's Institute of Earth Sciences in new research published in Science Advances on Friday. (Robin Dawson, Daniel Field, Pincelli Hull, Darla Zelenitsky and François Therrien comprised Affek's team.)
The existence of thermoregulation in sauropods (like the Brontosaurus), three-toed theropods (like the T-Rex) and ornithischians (like the Stegosaurus) was nailed down by clumped isotope geochemistry. This method analyzes chemical bonds between heavy isotopes in calcium carbonate minerals—the main ingredient in egg shells, Hebrew University explains. This enables scientists to deduce the temperature at which the minerals formed inside the mother's body.
Anzu wyliei: warm-blooded dinosaurReuters, illustration by Bob Walters
Clumped isotope is more reliable than previous methods that generated indeterminate results, leading to "tons of assumptions," as Affek puts it, about body size, growth rates and internal temperature. This time, the team researched dinosaur eggs that were laid in a relatively cold place: Alberta, Canada, in addition to one dinosaur egg from Romania. If they'd taken eggs from hot climes, it would have proved nothing: the mother's body temperature could have been a cold-blooded response to the hot environment, Affek explains.
It is true that when these dinosaurs were alive, Alberta was subtropical. But analysis to estimate environmental temperature of shells from mollusks and snails that coexisted alongside dinosaurs shows that temperatures were around 25 to 28 degrees Celsius.
A 190-million-year-old unhatched dinosaur embryo in the egg credit:REUTERS
Romania was also subtropical at the time, but the existing climate models and temperature proxy data suggest that the body temperature of the mother dinosaur in Romania was warmer than its environment, Affek says.
Three of the studied eggs that had been laid in Alberta by Troodon formosus, somewhat bird-like dinosaurs that artists imagine looked like a muscular turkey with roid rage. One was from Maiasaurus peeblesorum, which looks rather bovine and lived some 75 million years ago. The third dinosaur group was represented by an egg believed to be of a dwarf Titanosaur found in Romania. Why? Because there are no abundant Sauropod eggshell remains in Alberta, Dawson explains.
Rugops primus of the Sahara, dinosaur, warm-blooded credit:AP
The fact that the representatives of three major groups were demonstrated to be warm-blooded suggests that all dinosaurs were, as a basal condition. It may be inferred that the ancestral creature to dinosaurs, whatever it was, was likely warm-blooded.
Dawson requests to clarify that "warm-blooded" is an outdated term for "had metabolic control of their body temperatures."
Leinkupal laticaudas fending off predators; all the dinosaurs shown here were warm-blooded credit:Renters, illustration by Jorge Antonio Gonzalez
"Birds today can go into torpor and lower their body temperature to conserve energy during winter or breeding, and some egg-laying mammals can also lower their body temperature. These strategies are sometimes termed heterothermic. This means the animal behaves somewhere between homeothermic (constant internal body temp, or sometimes called endothermic) and poikilothermic (variable internal body temp, or sometimes called ectothermic)," she explains to Haaretz.
There is yet another intermediate strategy, called mesothermic, employed by leather-back sea-turtles, Mako sharks and others who can raise their temperature above ambient, but don't have a set-point at which they keep that temperature, she says.
Maiasaurus, a warm-blooded dinosaur credit:REUTERS
"Even if there is some variability in body temperature, being clearly warmer than the environment suggests that [the dinosaurs] had metabolic control of their body temperature and they were not simply fluctuating along with their environment."
Asked why eggs laid in a subtropical environment rather than a colder one were chosen for the study, Dawson explains that it's hard to find any: In the Cretaceous (145 to 64 million years ago), greenhouse gases were anywhere from two to six times pre-industrial levels and the planet was hotter than today. But that is a direction for future research is to find dino eggs in colder places and analyze them.
Separate unrelated studies reached similar conclusions about feathering: it was the basal dinosaurian condition to be feathered. Loss of feather coating would, by that theory, have been secondary, for instance in the case of the giant dinosaurs that could have become overheated.
So from being sluggish "terrible lizards" with scales, cold blood and pea-brains that went extinct, dinosaurs are now understood to have been, by and large, a frisky warm-blooded bunch that had some feathers, some scales and pea-brains that did not all go extinct. Most dinosaurs, including all the big ones, did die out after the famed meteor strike, but today's birds arose from one group of therapods that survived. And now we know that they inherited not only their feathery coats but thermal regulation from their long-gone ancestors.
https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-...inds-1.8533001Storm Ciara uncovered evidence of dinosaurs on British beach
Jeff ParsonsFriday 14 Feb 2020 11:39 am
Storm Ciara uncovered this footprint left by dinosaurs (Solent News & Photo Agency/Getty) The turbulent weather of Storm Ciara has caused chaos across the UK, but it there was a serendipitous side effect down on the Isle of Wight. It turns out the high winds have uncovered a footprint made by dinosaurs that roamed the area millions of years ago. The fossilised imprint – believed to belong to one of a group of carnivorous dinosaurs known as therapods – is a trace of ‘vanished worlds’ and is estimated to be at least 130 million years old. Found on Sandown Bay on the Isle of Wight, experts believe that the recent stormy weather blew away sand which had covered the unusual find for millennia. Local fossil hunting group, Wight Coast Fossils, announced the discovery. Group member Theo Vickers, said: ‘All this weather is revealing traces of vanished worlds along our coastline. This is a really fascinating example of how events like Storm Ciara continue to expose traces of ancient environments around our geologically unique coastline, often in plain sight such as this footprint. ‘Sandown Bay has revealed this beautiful 130 million year old dinosaur track yesterday, preserved in the brightly coloured clay.’
Neovenator salerii was a prehistoric era dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous period (Getty Images/Stocktrek Images) Mr Vickers said that the pointed toes of the fossil indicate a large dinosaur known as a theropod and say it could be either a ‘Neovenator’ or a ‘Spinosaurus Baryonyx’. He added: ‘It will typically disappear in a couple of days or weeks, as the tide wears down the soft clays of the formation, an awesome but fleeting glimpse of a time long gone, lying in plain sight on our coastline.’ The discovery comes just a fortnight after the fossilised remains of a dinosaur tail was revealed in cliffs further along the Isle of Wight coastline.
Read more: https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/14/storm...7/?ito=cbshare
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