Some of the oldest evidence of bone disease may have been caused by tiny 83-million-year-old parasites infecting a titanosaur, which are among the largest land animals that ever lived. This is the first discovery of parasites in a dinosaur bone.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a new kind of parasite,鈥� says Aline Ghilardi at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 have anything similar to it.鈥�
This fossilised parasite was seen in a sample from a dwarf titanosaur, a species first identified from a leg bone found in a deposit near S茫o Paulo, Brazil, in 2009 that dated to the late Cretaceous period. The dwarf titanosaur species, dubbed 鈥淏ilbo鈥�, would have been 5 or 6 metres long, a little smaller than most titanosaurs.
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鈥淚t鈥檚 our hobbit titanosaur,鈥� says Ghilardi.
She and her team analysed a sample of the leg bone, cutting thin sections of the fossil and analysing them using a medical CT scanner.
The researchers found that the dinosaur was old and infirm. They analysed strange, spongy bumps on its bones, and found that they were probably due to an aggressive form of osteomyelitis, a type of bone infection often spread by fungi, bacteria or protozoa.
Based on the way the infection typically works in animals or humans today, they deduced that the state of the disease was so advanced that this dwarf titanosaur would have been covered in open wounds. The team gave it another nickname: Dino Zombie.
Further analysis also revealed microorganisms that were present in the dwarf titanosaur鈥檚 blood when it died. Ghilardi says these might be large protozoans or nematode worms, and could have even been the cause of the bone infection, although it is difficult to say for sure.
The parasite seems to be something we have never seen before, she says, and learning more about it could teach us about how modern related diseases evolved.
Cretaceous Research