The prehistoric world wasn’t a paradise free of disease, but diagnosing ancient ailments is tricky: Germs usually don’t fossilize well. Now, though, researchers have unearthed evidence of what appears to be the oldest known respiratory infection in a dinosaur.
Lesions found in the vertebrae of a 150-million-year-old juvenile sauropod dubbed “Dolly” point to a lung infection that moved into her bones, vertebrate paleontologist Cary Woodruff and colleagues report February 10 in Scientific Reports. That’s at least 50 million years older than the previously reported respiratory infection in a titanosaur unearthed in Brazil.
Dolly, a long-necked dinosaur, was probably closely related to Diplodocus. At the time of her death in
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