It is, according to paleontologists, do not disturb the dinosaur to live and eat.
Paleontologists found in Romania the remains of an unusual duck-billed dinosaur jaw which was disfigured by a large tumor due to uncontrolled growth of tissues of the tooth enamel.
“The opening of ameloblastoma in the remains of a duckbilled dinosaur suggests that we have more in common with these giant reptiles than we previously thought. It turns out that people and dinosaurs suffer from the same malignancy (benign tumors),” says Bruce Rothschild (Bruce Rotschild) from North East medical University of Ohio in Rootstown (USA).
Rothschild and his colleagues conducted excavations on the territory of Hungary and Romania, where it is overlain by rocks of the late Cretaceous period, formed shortly before the extinction of dinosaurs as a result of falling of an asteroid or the eruption of volcanoes in India.
Central and Eastern Europe at that time was not land, but a set of large and small Islands, each of which was inhabited by unique flora and fauna. We lived here extremely bizarre dinosaurs turned into “gnomes” because of the effect of the so-called “island dwarfism” winged “dragons”-Balaur, and giant pterodactyls with a height of three meters and a wingspan of 12 meters.
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The remains of most of them were found on the so-called Hateg island – a geological formation located in the territory of modern Transylvania in the district of Hunedoara. In this area, Rothschild and his colleagues found a very unusual dwarf remains of the hadrosaur, duck-billed lizard, Telmatosaurus transsylvanicus.
On the left side of the jaw of a hadrosaur that scientists have discovered a large “bump” which fossilization, apparently, was a fairly dense bone tissue. It will likely be easy to notice even at the time when the owner of the skull was alive.
Opening an unusual bone formation, scientists became interested in his nature, and tried to open her skull after using the imager. It turned out that this “bump” was an ameloblastoma is a benign tumor arising from incorrect expansion of those tissues of the jaws and teeth, which are responsible for the formation of tooth enamel in humans and other animals.
It is, according to paleontologists, do not disturb the dinosaur to eat, but she could set it apart from the other dogs, making it a constant target of attacks by predators. The cause of death of this hadrosaur is not yet clear, which does not allow to agree or object to such conclusions.
According to scientists, previously, nobody has been able to find a similar swelling of the face in the remains of the dinosaurs, although other types of lesions and anomalies of the bone tissue has been repeatedly found in the remains of ancient reptiles.
The presence of such tumors among dinosaurs of Hateg island, as noted by the authors, suggests that the island isolation leads not only to reduction in the size of animals but also their genetic degeneration and the development of a number of diseases such as the ameloblastoma. Something similar may have survived the famous “hobbits” on Flores island, lived in similar conditions as the inhabitants of the island of Hateg.
