A rare disease LCH discovered in a 66-million-year-old dinosaur tumor

A rare disease that still affects humans today has been found in the fossilized remains of a duck-billed dinosaur that roamed the Earth at least 66 million years ago.

The back of a skull found in a Grecian cave has been dated to 210,000 years ago. Known as Apidima 1, right, researchers were able to scan and re-create it (middle and left). The rounded shape of Apidima 1 is a unique feature of modern humans and contrasts sharply with Neanderthals and their ancestors.

The incredibly well-preserved fossil of a 3 million-year-old extinct species of field mouse, found in Germany, which was less than 3 inches long, was found to have red pigment in its fur.
They compared the vertebrae with the skeletons of two humans who were known to have a benign tumor called LCH (Langerhans cell histiocytosis), a rare and sometimes painful disease that affects children, mainly boys. Hadrosaur vertebra.

“Diagnosing diseases in skeletal remains and fossils is complicated as in some cases different diseases leave similar marks on bones. LCH, however, has a distinctive appearance that fit to the lesions found in the hadrosaur,” said Dr. Hila May, head of the Biohistory and Evolutionary Medicine Laboratory, at TAU’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine.
The researchers used advanced, high-resolution CT scans to analyze the dinosaur tail fossils.

“New technologies,such as the micro CT scanning, enabled us to examine the … structure of the lesion and reconstruct the overgrowth as well as the blood vessels that fed it,” May told Newswire.

“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,” May said.

In humans, LCH is sometimes described as a rare form of cancer but May said that there are different opinions among experts as to whether it is definitively a cancer or not because in some cases its passes spontaneously.
“Most of the LCH-related tumors, which can be very painful, suddenly appear in the bones of children aged 2-10 years. Thankfully, these tumors disappear without intervention in many cases,” she said.

Hadrosaurs would have stood about 10 meters high and weighed several tons. They roamed in large herds 66 to 80 million years ago, the study, which published this week in the journal Scientific Reports said.