Monday, February 22, 2016

The Stories of February: Giant Dinosaur Had 2 Tumors on Its Tailbone

It’s fairly common to discover dinosaur remains scratched with ancient claw or bite marks, but finding fossils with signs of tumors is rare.

And now scientists have found not one but two different types of tumor on the same bone — the vertebra of a titanosaur, a gigantic long-necked, long-tailed paleo beast, a new study finds.

“Finding any disease in fossils is rare,” said the study’s lead researcher, Fernando Barbosa, a doctoral student of geology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. “Cancer still is most rare because the majority of them do not leave signals in bones.”

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