Fossilized vertebrae with signs of a respiratory infection show that this sauropod probably felt pretty crummy.
“I’ve looked at sauropods from all over the world and I’ve never seen a feature like this before,” says Cary Woodruff, the director of paleontology at the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in Malta, Montana and a couthor of the findings. “It helps us understand the world that these dinosaurs were in—what kinds of illness and diseases plagued the tyrant lizards.”
Dinosaurs share numerous anatomical features with their living avian relatives and are thought to have breathed similarly to birds, he says. The respiratory system is more efficient in birds than mammals, with extrain the lungs and structures that penetrate into the bones. Dinosaurs also have sockets where respiratory tissue connects to the bone known as pleurocoels. “I like the analogy of a vacuum cleaner,” Woodruff says.
To narrow down the type of infection Dolly suffered from, the researchers took CT scans of the afflicted vertebrae. In modern birds, some respiratory illnesses cause rind-like growths to develop on the outside of the bone. But in Dolly, the scans suggested, the interior of the bones was also “really screwed up,” Woodruff says.
The elaborate and circuitous pulmonary complex of the sauropod, with the hypothetical route of infectious pathway in MOR 7029, or Dolly. Human scale bar is the profile of a man standing 67 inches tall.While Dolly probably didn’t have quite the same disease seen in today’s birds, its bony growths support the idea that dinosaurs were susceptible to fungal respiratory infections and may offer insights about how their immune systems worked.
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