Meet Dolly—not American singer Dolly Parton, or Dolly the sheep who was the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell, but—the first evidence of any kind of respiratory infection in a non-avian dinosaur.
Dolly was a diplodocid, a long-necked dinosaur that roamed Montana 150 million years ago. It measured a whopping 18 meters long, but when Dolly died at 15 years of age, it had only lived half of its life.
CT scans of Dolly's fossil showed abnormal bony growth (red) in Dolly's vertebrae, a sign of secondary bone infection. Scientists suspected that this infection could have been caused by a respiratory illness, possibly from bacterial or fungal infections. Some examples include chlamydiosis and aspergillosis which are common in birds today.
Dr Cary Woodruff and colleagues published their findings in Scientific Reports.
#Dinosaur #Pneumonia #RespiratoryInfection #Archaeology
Image source: Woodruff et al. (2022) in Scientific Reports