Paleopathology: The Hard Life and Times of a Hadrosaur

A herd of hadrosaur-like dinosaurs in happier times, frolicking with friends. Why "hadrosaur-like," you ask? Because hadrosaurs themselves are not well known, even though duck-billed dinosaurs, the group to which they belonged, are fairly common in the fossil record. Credit: Jason Poole of the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University. Life was rough back in the Late Cretaceous, some 70 million years ago. The constant threat of predation, the relentless hunt for food, no convenience stores or acute care walk-in clinics. And for at least one particular hadrosaur, a variety of plant-eating, duck-billed dinosaur, things got particularly nasty when it developed septic arthritis in the elbow of one of its forelimbs. But what was a lousy break for a long-dead dinosaur is a boon to science today: X-ray microtomography (XMT) scanning allowed researchers to document this unprecedented paleopathology in fascinating detail, and to use it to further our knowledge of the prevalence of disease in dinosaurs.