Researchers may have found a smoking gun for human cancer research and it goes back almost 70 million years. The smoking gun in question is actually the fossilized remains of a small cow-sized dinosaur, which researchers say had a small tumor. Now, they’ve linked what appears to have been red blood cells to the tumor, showing that dinosaurs may have struggled with cancer millions of years ago, too.
This discovery is more than just a sign that dinosaurs got cancer, though. It’s also a sign that tissue may exist in other fossils, and that it may have been preserved more often than we previously believed. The methods that made this discovery possible are also relatively underused, the researchers report.
From here, though, preservation of these samples is important, as understanding how the dinosaurs dealt with cancer could mean major leaps forward in our own human cancer researcher. Considering the strides researchers have made in new cancer treatments over the years, something like this could be a big help to future research.
Luckily, proteins found in calcified tissue like bone is much more stable than traditional DNA. Plus, as we dig deeper into the genetics of the dinosaurs preserved in these fossils, we could hopefully uncover more about how cancer in dinosaurs affected the larger population. We know some animals don’t get cancer, like elephants and whales.
The tumor found on this particular dinosaur is a type still found in humans today, which means this type of tumor has been affecting animals on our planet for millions of years. Understanding how they dealt with it, without any kind of modern medicine, could hopefully unlock some additional opportunities for researchers.
Of course, finding more dinosaur tissue to study isn’t going to be easy. There’s no way to tell when tissue will still be present in a fossil. But continued exploration could result in tissue and DNA that researchers can use in their goal to understand not only the past, but where we currently are in our fight against deadly diseases like cancer.
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