Coughing Dinosaurs?

Her name is Dolly, and she apparently had a very bad cough. Fatally bad. In fact, it was so bad, it left a 150-million-year record within Dolly’s neck bones!

Dolly’s technical name is MOR 7029. She is an adolescent longnecked diplodocid from the late Jurassic Period whose bones were uncovered in Montana in 1990. Within those bones were signs of a respiratory infection not so different from the flu or a fungal illness called aspergillosis. Those signs are in the form of swellings and abnormal bony growths in several vertebrae in areas that would have been connected to air sacs that were in turn linked to the lungs. The “broccoli-shaped” abnormalities were revealed thanks to CT imaging of the fossil.

Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, paleontologist Cary Woodruff (Great Plains Dinosaur Museum, Montana) and colleagues say this is the first time clear evidence of such a condition has been found in a non-avian dinosaur.