Post by Curator Dr. Andrew McDonald.
The popular image of dinosaurs is as indestructible monsters of old, but actually they were just as susceptible to injury and disease as any living animal. While working on part of a duck-billed hadrosaur in the WSC prep lab, volunteer Joe Reavis and I noticed something odd on one of the neural spines of this 79-million-year-old skeleton. Neural spines are the broad planks of bone rising vertically from the vertebrae. In our hadrosaur, this particular neural spine consists mostly of smooth, normal bone, except for an abnormal area on one side that has a lumpy and amorphous appearance. This area is circled in red in the image.
This unusual area of bone appears to be some sort of pathology - an injury, disease, or malformation of the bone. We'll need to comb the literature and consult with colleagues before trying to interpret the nature of this pathology. In any case, this is a really fascinating insight into the life of this one individual dinosaur. A single dinosaur skeleton can reveal a great deal about the species it represents - how it evolved, what it ate, how it grew, how it moved, how it interacted with other creatures in its ecosystem. But here we have a single occurrence in the life of this hadrosaur, which is pretty special.
This is the first pathology we've observed among the dinosaurs housed at WSC. This hadrosaur was collected in the Menefee Formation of New Mexico, with our colleagues from the Zuni Dinosaur Institute for Geosciences and Southwest Paleontological Society.