![]() The infection had moved from the lungs to the bones, which emphasizes just how severe the disease was, he noted. ![]() “Imagine a fossilized piece of broccoli.” ![]() The borders of the sockets that connect the respiratory tissue are usually smooth, but the bone growth in this specimen was abnormal, lumpy and textured, he said. Researchers found “never-before-seen” abnormal bony protrusions of unusual shape and texture in the dinosaur’s neck, he said. ![]() “It was very, very similar to a respiratory disease that birds get from breathing in fungal spores.” “What we had in Dolly was very consistent with respiratory infections that are found in birds,” Woodruff said in an interview. While the dinosaur was under 20 years old when it died, the fossil dates back to the late Jurassic Period about 150 million years ago. The fossilized remains of a diplodocid - a large, longnecked, herbivorous dinosaur - were first found in southwest Montana, near Yellowstone National Park, in 1990. “So, it’s cool that you can hold that 150-million-year-old bone from Dolly and you literally know how crummy that dinosaur felt when it was sick,” he said. Researchers named the diplodocid Dolly, after the country western singer Dolly Parton. A really bad flu.Ĭary Woodruff, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Toronto, and a team of researchers studieda fossil that may provide evidence of the first known case of a bird-style lung disease in a dinosaur.
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