An examination of fossil dinosaur bones using state-of-the-art imaging techniques reveals impressive bone healing ability, British researchers say, allowing the prehistoric creatures to recover from even massive trauma.
Signs of trauma or disease and subsequent evidence of healing from even grisly injuries in the fossils suggest dinosaurs could recover from trauma that would be fatal to humans without medical treatment.
"It seems dinosaurs evolved a splendid suite of defense mechanisms to help regulate the healing and repair of injuries," says Phil Manning of the University of Manchester.
The researchers used a kind of particle accelerator known as a synchrotron that creates a light as bright as 10 billion suns to peer deep within the fossil ones of a predatory dinosaur from 150 million years in the past.
The fossil examined in the study was of an Allosaurus fragilis, unearthed in Utah.
Reported in the Royal Society journal Interface, The synchrotron technology allowed them to examine the healed breaks, fractures and cracks in the bones without having to cut into and destroy the irreplaceable fossils.
"Using synchrotron imaging, we were able to detect astoundingly dilute traces of chemical signatures that reveal not only the difference between normal and healed bone, but also how the damaged bone healed," Manning says.
Unlike other body parts, bone does not heal by forming scar tissue but must grow new bone in the same process a skeleton grew in the first place.
However, there exist subtle differences in the chemistry of old and new bones, and researchers were able to tease out "chemical ghosts" of the ancient breaks and fractures in the fossils.
"This is beyond recognizing a healed injury -- this is mapping the biological processes that enable that healing," Manning says.
The large number of successfully healed traumatic injuries found in fossils suggests that predatory dinosaurs, at least, had the ability to absorb and recover from significant trauma.
The finding that the exact biological processes involved in bone development and healing in dinosaurs is found in almost all vertebrates -- including humans -- could help improve the diagnosis, treatment and healing in many modern-day ailments, Manning says.
