You're listening to Weird and Dead, the paleontology podcast
that tells evolutions most embarrassing and bizarre
stories. I'm Amy Atwater.
And I'm Megan Wetherell, and we're two living scientists who
are really excited about dead things.
In this episode we get way too excited about dead things as
they were dying because we're talking about signs of illnesses
and injury in fossil animals. We're going to talk about
dinosaur cancer, the logistics of getting fucked up hard enough
to leave a mark on your bone, and the nasty pus filled
consequences of surviving an animal bite.
Like always, our podcast talks about some disgusting stuff, so
please read through the content warnings before continuing.
This is going to be an interesting episode as I know
how gross it's going to be. So just be fully, fully
prepared. And to start, we're going to
talk about one of the organisms that introduced me to this topic
of being able to see injury, disease, all these problems in
the bone. And that is arguably probably
the most famous case of paleopathology in the fossil
record for dinosaurs at least. And that would be Big Al, the
Allosaurus, who is really famous because they made can.
I tell you really quick, I've been thinking that Al was a T
Rex this whole time. I forgot that he was an
Allosaurus, but that's why I didn't do that research project.
I was like, oh, yeah, all that T Rex, they had all those
problems. Oh.
From afar their skulls look meh, pretty close.
I mean, I know they don't. Nerds.
I know they're not and. Up close they look the fucking
same to me so. Exactly.
Our logo at work is has an Allosaurus on it and people call
it AT Rex all the time. And I'm like, well, yeah, duh.
It's not that surprising. So I don't expect the general
public to even know these dinosaurs names necessarily.
So this is about the Big Al, the Allosaurus.
This is a specimen that I used to manage, I suppose, is the
paleo collections manager at Museum of the Rockies.
That's where Big Al lives. It is a 95% complete Allosaurus
specimen from Wyoming. And it got its own TV show.
It's doing way better than us, Megan.
And it's dead. For 100 and. 45,000,000 years
it's. Because it's got a white man's
name. And was found and published on
and celebrated by exactly those folks.
And us and everyone else. We all get inspired by
dinosaurs. And yeah.
So there was the ballad of Big Al.
I always just like, hear that Paul Simon song.
You can call me Al. That's always what I think about
when I hear Big Al. Anyway, yeah, it is a really
cool fossil because it's 95 fucking percent complete.
Like, that's insane. Like, that is in paleo world.
That's pretty. That's pretty great for a large
animal. That's great.
And then what's really spectacular about it is that
this poor, poor dinosaur shows signs of 19 different
pathologies. So pathologies meaning as we
will get into injuries. Collecting illnesses.
Yeah, exactly. Literally like a Girl Scout
badge. They were just like 1 here, one
there. So all of the different places
that this dinosaur had injuries where they also showed signs of
well, healing while also getting much worse.
So this animal lived, lived through the these experiences.
They did not all happen at once. It really was like a obstacle
course of hell. It has injuries to its ribs, its
gastralia, which is its tummy. Ribs, they're cute.
We got the vertebra that are messed up are the door.
So the back ones, the neck ones, the tail ones, chevrons, which
are the cute little part that hang off of a tail, a scapula.
So the one of the shoulder blades got messed up, part of
the claw on one of the hands shows signs of it would have
been really ouchy to attack with.
We also have injuries to the hips.
And then the ones that really stick in my brain the most are
the ones on the metatarsals and the phalanges of the foot.
They are really, really, really intense.
You can I only have two pictures this episode.
I did good. So you can go ahead and Scroll
down. That looks like a rib that's
like shoved through a donut of what I'm assuming is bow.
Yeah, yeah. Doughnut bone.
That's the messed up rib, which was described as like having a
giant hole of pus, which is probably the first of many times
you're gonna hear that word this episode.
Just buckle up, y'all. And then the one that really
makes me cringe is the one of its foot.
So that's the second picture I have for you buddy.
That looks like a cry noise. Yeah, that does looks like.
Fierce to crinoid. Which one's the anal chimney?
I think it's the fucked up metatarsal.
Dealer's choice, really. Yeah, that's that's an
unpleasant growth to have in circling your toe.
So what I love about this image is that you can see a healthy
example of what this bone should look like on the other fingers,
toes, I should say. And you can just have this
example. So it's the middle one that's
got this huge, like it just looks like it's got a pin, yada
in the middle of it. And the other sides are normal
and not crazy infected to the same degree to really show you
that this would have been, I mean, this would have been
debilitating. This would have most definitely
affected your ability to hunt and protect yourself.
While it obviously didn't kill this dinosaur right off the bat
because of this excess gnarly bone growth from the infection,
it eventually is one of the contributing factors.
And that's what the Ballad of Big Al is all about.
It's all about these terrible things that happened to this
juvenile Allosaurus. It starts with it essentially
like, oh, like a hatchling, yay. Then it gets bigger and it's
trying to hunt and then this Diplodocus wax it with its neck
or something like that and like messes up, I don't know, like
it's vertebra and whatnot. And then it tries to hit on a
older lady and she does not like it and she bitch slaps him and
breaks all of his ribs. And then later he trips while
he's hunting and breaks his toe. I mean it's like very dramatic.
So I've never actually watched it.
I'm just reading the Wikipedia like summary.
That's a lot of main character energy from.
Yeah, they describe it in the papers, a great paper from 2002
looking at it. And yeah, on a lot of the parts,
like the specifically that rib I showed you and that messed up
toe bone would have had a fistula with it, which was an
opening on the skin for pus discharge.
And that is the type of stuff I've been reading about.
So please explain some of these concepts, these definitions, and
why we're talking about this disgustingness today.
Yeah, so paleopathology is just kind of the study of all of the
terrible shit that could have possibly happened to you before
you became a fossil. And we're going to be talking a
lot about anti mortem stuff today.
So there's anti mortem, which is before death, Perry mortem which
is around death and is frequently this is what you died
from and post mortem, which is stuff that happened to you after
you died. Maybe you got eaten by
something, maybe you got nod on. And we're mostly going to be
talking about stuff that happened to you before you died
because that's the only way that you can develop these features.
It's not that Al got a bone infection and passed away
immediately. Sadly for Al, Al suffered for a
long time. So a lot of the animals we're
talking about today, they had to actually suffer because the
things that we're looking at are your bone attempting to deal
with an infection, to deal with an injury, to heal itself.
And it's not always successful. And if it was fully successful,
we wouldn't see that thing before you died.
So we're talking about anti mortem stuff here today.
So we're not talking about like, I mean, maybe you'll talk a
little bit about it, but we're not really talking about like,
oh, bite Marks and predation and all of that stuff.
Like, we're mostly going to be talking about, we're going to
talk about a little, but you know, dying doesn't produce pus.
And that's really the topic. That was the qualifier.
We discussed this. It was like, what are the
parameters of this? Of all the injuries, only the
ones that are Pus producing, yes.
Yeah. Our tentative title listed here
is either Paleopus or paleopathology and gross pus
bones. Pyogenic, by the way, is the
official Latin term for produces pus.
And so pretty much most of what we're talking about today is
something that produces pus. So when you are looking at
paleopathology, regardless of what sort of injury or illness
you're looking at, the basic idea is that bone is either
added or bone is removed. And that can look like bone is
moving, right? Like if you, if you get scraped
and healed, you're going to you're going to develop like
ridges, but that's not bone being moved.
That is bone remodeling itself and bone like being added
basically after you've had bone injury.
So all forms of paleopathology that we're talking about today
are some form of the bone is being added or the bone is being
removed for one reason or another.
And that is how you can tell that it's not healthy bone,
because healthy bone bone has an expected amount of bone.
You can look at the other toes on Elle's feet and you can see
smooth outside bone where there should be smooth bone, rough
bone where there should be muscle attachments.
But there's usually the easiest way to tell that something is
healthy is by looking at other members of its species, because
that's how you cross compare, right?
Otherwise, you might do what some, yeah, some early
paleontologists did and assume that some of the grossness that
we're going to talk about with Orionons, for example, was
species distinct. So turns out that some early
paleontologists in like, the 40s and 50s looked at some very sick
Orionons and thought each one was a different species because
of its different degree of sickness.
The easiest way to tell that that's not the case and that
you're actually looking at disease is to cross compare
individuals, especially if they're coming from the same
formation. That's a really a really nice
easy way to look at them. But bone, healthy bone also kind
of has like a, a pretty a pretty consistent look to it, I would
say. I know it is usually pretty
smooth. You know it when you see it.
Yeah. So healthy bone typically has at
least in in mammals. I'm sure other animals have this
too, but I don't care about them.
So whatever you can decide if it it does or does not happen in a
dinosaur. But the inside of the bone,
you'll have some hollow spaces if it's like your long bone.
But like if you took your leg bone, you'd have a little bit of
a hollow space. But a lot of like it's called
spongy bone because it really does look like a sponge that's
inside your bone. It's also called trabecular
bone. And then on the outside, you
have a really, really hard layer of like thickened smooth bone
that doesn't have a lot of pock marks in it.
And that's the cortical bone. But the very outside of that can
have small attachments for like tendons.
It can have places where blood vessels are going in and out.
It can have foramina, which is a big hole where nerves go
through. So in order to identify healthy
bone versus unhealthy bone, you can't just look at something and
say there's a hole in it. Clearly this animal was sick.
I would be like looking at a skull and being like, there's
two big holes right here in front of the nose.
Clearly that that animal is dying when really those are eye
sockets, right? So you do have to kind of cross
compare these things. Yeah, there is a lot of
different ways that the bone can be impacted, right.
So with Big Owl, it sounds like there was some trauma involved.
It's considered to be injuries for some of them.
However, the paper does go into probably what you're about to
talk about, which is like, you know, injuries versus like
infections or illnesses. And then there's a whole
category of idiopathic of we don't really know, but it's
fucked up. Yeah, so illness, injuries, as
my doctors keep informing me in a way that I think is frankly
very rude, age and also impact your bones.
I have a few bone spurs and apparently those are not signs
of illness. They're just me getting older
than my doctors, which is a little unsettling.
And the other thing is that it's not just illness and injury,
because two people exposed to the same illness, like two
people who get arthritis, will not have the exact same
reaction. So there are actually some
things that make the immune response, for example, cause
remodeling of the bone. So cause your body to take that
calcium and maybe add some more bone, maybe remove bone, but
your body is actually doing that.
It's not like it's been scratched, touched away by
arthritis. It's not like arthritis is a
disease that just tosses bone at you.
Arthritis is something where your body's immune response is
adding on chunks of bone. So can you guess, Amy, what are
some of the things that would make you more likely to have an
immune response? Immune.
Or stronger. Immune response.
I'm on the spot and I'm nervous. Well, you are one of them, so
that. Being a woman, I know that we
have more. I know that we have more
autoimmune diseases. I have psoriasis and there's
psoriatic arthritis that I have to look forward to.
But yeah, so stress, having a uterus, being alive.
Stress having a uterus. What goes into that uterus?
Yeah. Oh, oh, having children, babies
usually. Oh my God.
Wait, is that gonna make it worse?
Yeah, so being pregnant will change your immune response,
right? That's why pregnant women have
to be really careful. Yeah, you have to be careful
about like the things you're exposed to because.
As an alien in your own body, yes.
Yes. Yeah, you don't want your immune
system to attack your fetus. This is how my sister got cat
scratch fever when she was pregnant.
The thing that you don't usually actually catch, but you can when
your body's trying not to kill the embryo that's inside of you.
Women typically have a stronger immune response, which could
mean that if a woman and a man were exposed to something that
would cause arthritis, because some arthritis is just age.
Some arthritis is actually caused by diseases.
It's called reactive arthritis. And then of course, there's
things like siretic arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis, which
are autoimmune diseases. But if you took a man and a
woman, the woman's body would react more strongly, potentially
giving her more signs of arthritis, but also potentially
doing things like healing it faster if it is something like
reactive arthritis. So you're.
Trying to tell me there's something a little bit OK 'cause
I was like, this episode already is disgusting and now you're
bumming me out about my. Now I'm flipping you out.
Big female. So your immune response is
faster, but like that also I think technically means that
your healing response, if that immune response has ever
decreased, should also be faster, right?
So you might get worse bone growths, Amy, but as long as you
cure your syphilis afterwards, you'll.
Be fine. Oh God, let me fucking e-mail my
doctor. Real.
So this is a little different. Oh, it also depends on the bone
that is injured. So a lot of what I'm going to
talk about today is osteomyelitis, which is bone
infection and bone infection. It often has kind of this
characteristic response where the soft outer wrapping around
your bone because your bones come shrink wrapped in something
called periosteum, the periosteum which also deposits
something disgusting called bone bark.
But periosteum is not on every single bone.
So like your sesamoid bones, so your knees don't have
periosteum. So they respond differently to
infection. The cartilage like ends of your
bones often don't have periosteum.
So if you got like bone infection in your knee joint,
your body would behave differently than if you got bone
infection in your shin. All of this is to say, depending
on your gender, depending on your level of illness, depending
on your nutritional status, depending on where the injury
occurs, you can have all of these different levels of
reactions. So this stuff can look really
different, and it also looks really different between things
like mammals and reptiles and mammals and amphibians.
That said, there are some kind of consistent markers for
different ones. So some of them you can identify
and say I know exactly what that is, that is rickets or that is
probably tuberculosis rickets. But others you can't necessarily
identify as clearly. I know that is going to be
another theme of today is just laughing at the misery of
animals and fable. Yeah, I'm glad at least that
most of my stuff is happening to adults so I don't have to COO
over dead, injured babies again. The bright side?
Welcome. To the show, everybody.
Regardless of what sort of thing is impacting your bones, and
that can be things like tuberculosis, osteomyelitis, it
can be cancers, it can be syphilis, tuberculosis.
I already said tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is going to come up
a lot today. It's very common going back
through the fossil. Yeah.
And of course, fractures, getting your bone broken or even
bruised can show up on your bone, but only if that thing
doesn't kill you right away because all of the things we're
talking about are not lethal. And in fact, many of them
actually don't impede your ability as a species to
reproduce. So you mentioned looking at AL's
toe, that that looked really painful.
And I agree. I don't think that that is going
to fall into the didn't affect AL's life at all.
That said, just his loneliness. There are quite a few different
things like Megan's bone spurs that are apparently they're not
necessarily going to cause pain, especially if they don't occur
in the periosteum. The periosteum is the thing that
has nerves, so if they occur on like a sesamoid bone, you might
not necessarily be able to feel it.
Sometimes you can have things like neuropathic arthritis where
it damages your nerves so badly that you can't feel it, which
does make your arthritis significantly worse because you
just grit your bones against one another.
Yeah. And in the case of some animals,
it's like a pattern, not just like random one off.
So a great example would be rhinoceroses.
Our friend Kelsey Stilson did a huge project on not just
arthritis, but on lots of different types of
paleopathologies in the toes of of different species of rhinos
and cross compared that to their body mass and found that First
off, lots of rhinos have arthritis.
That does not mean that those rhinos were suffering or that
those rhinos were dying, but lots and lots of rhinos, even
baby rhinos, sometimes have arthritis.
Yeah, as these animals get bigger, the bigger the the rhino
species, the worse the paleo pathology is.
And yet rhinos, at least until we hunt the rest of them, are
still around, right. Like, there's been plenty of
rhinos that have survived. So these things are not
necessarily, you know. Yeah, they're, yeah, still
making arthritic babies. A lot of these things that we're
going to talk about are obvious. And if it's super obvious,
chances are it was probably pretty obvious to the animal as
well. But a lot of them are
potentially not as obvious to the animal, and they might not
have necessarily suffered either.
So not all of the things we're talking about are lethal, or at
least not at first. So cancer.
That one tends to be tends to be pretty, pretty lethal.
And it's also with you as you're talking about all that, I'm
thinking some of this stuff I'm going to tell you about mummies
and cancerous tumors. And mummies, it does seem like
maybe in those cases they, you know, didn't know that that's
what was causing their death or anything like that, Especially
because since they're mummies, there's some soft tissue.
So it's not just relying on the bones to, like, define that.
And I have, yeah, taken an interesting dive today.
I've been, like, really fascinated and then, like,
really bummed out reading about cancer in deep time.
But we do have cases of cancer from quite literally hundreds of
millions of years ago. Okay.
And I've also realized that within the cancer realm, it's
all about a presence of tumors. However, they are very they
stressed many times that if it's a benign tumor that that's not
that's not cancerous. So being able to define if it's
benign or malignant in a fossil is so it's wild.
So that's what some of the, I don't understand the, the
medical terminology and whatnot, but it's been looking at CT
scans and being able to study them.
This really cool paper I read about the oldest case of cancer
in a Triassic fossil is research that was done by I'm a big fan
of Yara Hariri. And it's a project that she was
working on when she was in Berlin.
That's right. Anyway, so we have this stem
turtle that's 240 million years years old with a leg bone that
does show it's a malignant tumor and that it really is.
Oh gosh, it looks also, you know, again, looks painful in
its own in its own ways. But it is they said that it
looks almost exactly like osteosarcoma in humans.
And that is not a super common cancer necessarily, but it is
one that affects the bones, starts in the bones, but then
can spread to organs as well. So it's bad news, really bad
news. But the I really liked that
Yara's work is showing and just articulating how it's important
to study these diseases in deep time, to understand how the
diseases themselves change too, and how your immune system has
evolved over time too. So to be able to positively
identify cancerous tumors in the fossil record, which is just
mind blowing in a lot of ways. I read this other paper that
they've been identified and mosasaurs, hadrosaurs, mammoths.
And then there's also evidence of also osteosarcoma in a
hominin fossil. It's in the foot of a hominin
from South Africa, and it's 1.7 million years old.
And it's the oldest case of confirmed cancer in a homininin.
So human, a very close relative of ours, this site has been
known to produce, I think Homo Ergaster and Paranthropus Boise
Eye. So it's probably from one of
those. And again, it's an ankle bone,
it's a metatarsal and it's got this big gnarly looking
cancerous growth on the bone there.
So it's been the interesting thing that this and the mummies
article went into is, you know, when the like the Max lifespan
for a human is, you know, like maybe 30 years, it makes it that
much more rare to find cancer, which as you said with, you
know, diseases of just shitty stuff to your skeleton in
general happens more when you get old.
And so it's really, really rare to find them in mummies.
But I read this really interesting paper about finding
cancer mummies essentially. And I was like, wow, that's
interesting. This is really sad.
And then I kept reading and guys, I just have to apologize.
I am so I can't help it. The first case is that of a
Roman period mummy belonging to an adult male who displayed
abnormal tissue mass in the rectum.
Next one as the Renaissance that's king a tumor mass was
identified in the rectum. Next 1A bowel loop of feces.
I was like get your. Colon checked.
Colon cancer is way more serious than we are going to pretend it
is here. Yeah, I guess we give soft
tissue you can find. And that none really great.
So again, those ones are affecting soft tissue.
So we'd have no unless it spreads or started elsewhere and
then got to soft tissue, we wouldn't necessarily know.
So it was very interesting approach with mummies and I
didn't read a whole lot more about it except wow, I do you
know guys, colon cancer rectal stuff is on the rise for our
generation. So eat your greens and go to the
doctor and hope that your fossilized mummy skeleton isn't
like full of cancer poop like 10,000 years from now.
So just an idea, but you do you. I'm sorry.
I feel really conflicted about laughing about butt.
Cancer, but but also if you see like a certain degree of
illness, there's this tendency to like, think of it as like a
pandemic, like it's impacting so many other individuals.
And that doesn't necessarily end up being true.
You have to take into consideration the fact that the
fossil record like is compacted time, right?
Like these animals often didn't actually live together.
Also that there's illnesses out there that just are not leaving
a fossil record. It's not that dinosaurs never
got butt cancer, it's that we sadly do not have a lot of
preserved butts. We're working hard to change
that. I don't know where I'm going
with that but like this idea. I don't either.
Amy Badly is looking into fossilizing her own asshole.
It is. Now I'm hearing of Dream of
Dreams that if we ever were able to give back and create some
sort of scholarship that it would be for inherently weird
science and be like, I'm sorry, you have to be persuasive enough
to tell us like why it matters, but why it's fucking hilarious.
I don't really care if it matters.
I care if it's funny largely story.
All right, so that's cancer is a broad topic I'm noticing here on
our notes. I again have called this T Rex
stuff and then specifically listed an animal and it's not AT
Rex so I really thought Big Al was a T Rex.
We live closer to T Rex than we do than T Rex did to Allosaurus.
So you do. Have to I don't like that that's
dinosaurs are dumb and they look the same that's how they.
Feel about us except for we would if a dinosaur saw us.
They would be like what weird hairless ginormous baby faced
bipedal ape is in my way except for we're not.
Anyway, never mind this whole dinosaurs dinosaur.
So when we talk about pathology, we can't.
I know you said we were going to talk a ton about this and I'm
going to talk about it, which is all about like violence and
fighting and the signs that we see of that.
I guess I have a little so you know I'm talking.
That's true. You do I, I know a little bit of
where you you might be going. So this one is more about, well,
OK, so like T Rex for example, right.
So there is an idea out there by one particular very vocal famous
paleontologist. The T Rex was an obligate
scavenger. All right, So that T Rex was
just not hunting anything but just scavenging for all of its
food. And a lot of people think this
is the total bullshit because it is.
So it's really fun to see papers come out that just are more
lines of evidence that point out that this is, you know, like, I
just don't know too many giant apex predators who wouldn't also
be, you know, a lot of animals do a lot of all right.
Bears are going to be both scavengers and hunters.
Bald eagles are both scavengers and hunters.
These seems like why can't it be both?
Why can't we just accept that it was it was fucking T Rex.
It did whatever it wanted. Some days it felt like trying to
eat some in Monosaurus and that is we have a couple specimens
that have I saw one in Montana that was healed bite wound in an
in Montosaurus. So big ass duck billed dinosaur.
It was anti mortem so it happened before, but we know it
because there were signs of healing.
So it obviously like did not die from that.
And for the bite mark of that size for the Hell Creek
formation, the only predator large enough that we know of,
maybe there was some giant Bigfoot of the Hell Creek out
there. Like Saber Fang sass.
Right, Yeah, yeah, I'm with like scales.
Yeah, I'm here for, you know, feathers down for that too.
However, like you know, the simplest explanation is that
that had your sword got bit by AT Rex and it healed, it didn't
kill the T Rex, I mean, or the Hatcher Sword.
Then there is another publication that came out, I
don't know when exactly, but in the last like 10 years or so,
that's AT Rex tooth crown that's actually stuck in a tailbone.
It's in one of the caudal vertebra.
So AT Rex tooth in an Edmonosaurus tailbone.
And it too did not, it showed signs of healing.
It was not, it didn't finish it off.
And then there's also an Edmonosaurus.
Again, they had to deal with T Rex a lot at DM and S.
So the Denver Museum of Nature and Science here in Colorado,
there's a mounted Edmonosaurus that looks like it kind of has
like a bite out of its tail. And it's hypothesized that this
was probably T Rex and it too, I'm pretty sure shows signs of
healing. However, like there is the
response to this is, well, doesn't show signs that T Rex
haunted necessarily, but that it did bite AT Rex and
Montessorius. Like it doesn't prove that T Rex
was 100% a it. Could have been knocked off by
another T Rex. It could have just had a loose
tooth for the day. It could have just fallen and T
Rex is so tall that it like got embedded in the bone I mean.
You know from the arms can they could only bench press 400 lbs
so they cannot get back up. It was like it just right.
It was like a toe, but the Montasaurus was just like, OK,
bite on. I'll get you out of here, little
buddy. Yeah, that's true.
Maybe it was like the land before time, but isn't that like
the? Mouse and the lion, it's like
that kind of fable or whatever. So again, so that, you know, the
haters gonna hey, I, I stand by what I said in the 1st place,
which is I think T Rex would have been just a totally going
for whatever was easiest and most optimal and, you know, most
available at the time, whether that was eating them or it also,
we have a ton of evidence that T Rex ate other T Rex.
And so, I mean, again, I guess that could have been scavenging.
God, that's grim. But we do have T Rex toe bones
with T Rex bite marks in them. So we do know that there was an
eating of their own going on. But it does seem that T Rex
preferred, you know, or at least a lot of evidence with bite
Marks and stuff and in Monosaurus and then of course,
Triceratops, which shows that it was the frilled likely of
Triceratops likely evolved to be a defense thing, not necessarily
for showing off or social display, but really was probably
to keep T Rex from biting the shit out of its most vulnerable
parts. And so there's a lot of
interesting evidence and signs of that too.
And then the other kind of famous thing with T Rex and
pathologies is that T Rex, some of the most well known skulls
including Sue and Montanas, T Rex and a couple others is that
there are holes that go through the mandible, the denary.
And it's hypothesized to be an avian respiratory kind of
illness thing. But that too is debated.
So not everybody buys that. That is an infection from a
specific disease and from a specific source.
So again, it just really highlights like, even with a
pretty ample sample size, it doesn't necessarily mean that we
understand exactly what's causing these injuries to be
leftover. And that is, you know, more shit
to study. One really interesting concept
that I was introduced to last year, this is a funny story too,
is that there's a lot of evidence that T Rex fucked with
Triceratops and ate Triceratops like and almost every museum
where they're together, T Rex is destroying this port
Triceratops, right? Like the new relatively new Deep
Time exhibit at the Smithsonian famously has the Nations T Rex,
which is the Wankel Rex. Everyone ripping the head off of
a triceratops in the display. And last year I was helping out
Dinosaur Ridge even before I started working there with
interviewing some folks for their podcast, which is awesome
by the way. Family friendly.
What an idea. Not like us.
And I was interviewing Doctor
Ali Nabavizadeh, who does a lot of comparative biology stuff.
He is a ceratopsian expert, so he studies a lot of the horned
dinosaurs. Just had this dope book come out
I think yet last year. All about some really crazy cool
illustrations. And one of the things that he
brought up is he's like, I'm just so tired of every single
thing being like Triceratops being like the butt of the joke.
And his point was he thinks that Triceratops probably managed to
do just as much damage to T Rex, but probably did it to soft
tissue. And probably like he, like he
relayed to me that it would be like the horns being used to go
upward into like the belly, like the bowels of the T Rex and
essentially like disembowel and would have would have been a
pretty proficient fighter against the T Rex.
But we don't see evidence for that because if that was the
case, it doesn't leave any record in the bone.
And he just as he actually made me come.
Around on Triceratops. Yeah, yeah.
And right. Doesn't give them a bone
infection that lasts for weeks until they finally die.
Just straight up disembowels T Rex.
Yeah, which is hot. Go for it.
Do it. I mean it.
It would have been like literally hot.
That would have been just like organs.
Just. So that's.
Stabbing AT Rex and coming back with a hat of entrails?
That's disgusting. Just.
Like drawn and quartered T Rex. It's fucking metal.
Yes, I'm gonna draw that. Maybe not.
That's kind of gross. Yeah.
So that was the last disgusting thing that I have to say today.
I will rest. Awesome.
Well, I have quite a bit more disgusting things to talk about
because I'm gonna start talking about osteomyelitis, which is
general bone infection. It can be caused by a lot of
different things and it specifically means infection of
the bone. So it's often secondary.
So it's not something that you just look at a bacteria and you
get the bacteria has to get into your system somehow and
frequently it has to get actually into the bone.
So getting a bite mark is a good way to start osteomyelitis.
Not necessarily the only way. Probably the most common form of
osteomyelitis, at least not outside of humans, is
actinomycosis, which is caused by a very specific soil bacteria
that then can invade the like gums and like the the dental
cavities of herbivores. So it causes a disease called
lumpy jaw, which is a form of osteomyelitis that essentially
all osteomyelitis. The way that you diagnose it as
being different from something else is that basically when
osteomyelitis, myelitis gets bad enough, it infects the inside of
the bone and so as a result you get pus build up on the in.
This is going to be really extra gross.
You get pus build up on the inside of your bone.
This is also with lumpy jaw. The reason it's called lumpy jaw
is because that pus puts severe pressure on the rest of your
bone to remodel. So your periosteum for example,
will then go ahead and create more bone on the outside to
compensate for the bone that is being eroded away on the inside.
It doesn't necessarily compensate fast enough.
So if you X-ray an animal that has osteomyelitis or person,
you'll usually see that the density of bone decreases
because it's like trying to outrace this form of pressure
and with Yeah, right. Like it's like this swelling
nasty, like it's a physics cavity.
It's a. Physics problem of.
Trying to physics problem. Continue to strengthen that bone
but can't because it's literally running out of in.
OK, wow. Yeah.
And one of the characteristics signs on the outside of the bone
is a typically your, the periosteum will kind of lift up
and start depositing bones somewhat erratically.
So like your bone will be swelling, which is a pretty good
sign. But also it has what's called,
I've seen it called a filigree texture like little lace
basically because it's like lots and lots and lots of little tiny
like rivulets. And like it's just basically
this weird chunk of trying to lay down bone super fast and
laying it down kind of erratically.
But the most obvious sign is, of course, sometimes that pus finds
a way out and creates a hole. And that hole isn't just in your
flesh. Like it's not just pus leaking
out of your cheek, which happens in lumpy jaw actinomycosis.
It's pus leaking out of your bone.
So a really good way to see if an animal had osteomyelitis of
any kind is you'll see a swollen bone.
If you X-ray it, it's not as dense on the inside.
Very frequently on the outside you'll have like this weird
filigree, Lacy kind of texture. Sometimes it's sinusoidal, so
it's got like little's shapes in it for some reason.
And also there will be a big hole, which when I first started
looking at oriadons, I thought were bite marks.
Yeah. So it can be a little bit
difficult to tell the difference between a bite mark that is
healing versus big old pus hole. Oh, she said it here first.
You want to know what the what the big old pus hole is is
called in a lot of this literature, Amy?
Well, what? No, tell me.
She's one of your It's one of your favorite words that's gonna
ruin. It is it called promiscuous
hole? Nope.
What's a hole that does it all? Oh my God, it's a cloaca.
It's got a cloaca. It's a pus.
Cloaca. Yeah, a cloaca for pus.
That makes it like, cute. Yeah, yeah, No, it doesn't.
Which brings me to Oriadons. So Oriadons, if you haven't
listened to the podcast, are the animal that I studied for my
dissertation and the research I'm going to talk about now is
my research. Imagine something that looks
kind of like a pig, but it's related to camels.
But its head is really fucking big compared to its body size.
I mean like the camel relation. I mean we might go into a bit
this like it would have spit in my face.
It would have been spit a spitter.
Oh, I've never considered whether they would be spitters
or not. I don't know.
I don't know if they spit like llamas and alpacas do.
That might just be a camelid thing.
So I don't know if there's going to be a fossil record for that
necessarily. So you can fill in your own your
own head. And the oreodont we're going to
talk about today is a genus called Primaricacurus.
It does have lots of other names because oreodont taxonomy is
insane, but most people will call it Primaricacurus and most.
People. OK, how many of the of us are
there? Like 10?
Are there 10 of us in the world? The people, the people who talk
about oreodons and don't just ignore them.
Mostly leave it out of them. Call them.
Primaricacurus. Yeah, so Primerica Karis is one
of the more pig shaped orients. It's got really short, stocky
legs, really big head, kind of terrifying teeth if I'm honest,
some pretty big fangs. But the weirdest part about
Primerica Kuris is its cheekbones.
So if you look at the cheekbones of this animal, what are you
laughing at? What is weirder the.
Weird thing to be the weird part of a creature, you know?
It's like. Not expected.
Yeah, most animals. You know who also has weird
cheekbones though are entelodonts.
And I'd, you know, those are like a defining part of their
their weird hell pig. Yes, yeah, weird cheekbones.
Isn't that weird in herbivores? So Primerica Kuris has really
wide cheekbones. They go out really far from the
sides of its heads and then the back of them curl up and like
over. So it's got this weird like
strange hook shape. We don't really 100% know what
they were for, but I have some ideas which are related to us in
a very long convoluted kind of series of events ways.
But initially when Primerica Kuris was being found and was
being described, a lot of paleontologists in the 40s
looked at each new kind of Primerica curious.
And they noticed, you know, that some of them had really wide
cheekbones and some of them just had kind of white cheekbones,
that some of them had really long faces and some that kind of
long faces. And a lot of that is probably
sexual dimorphism. They're describing like the
differences between females and males.
But one characteristic when I was first looking into Orion
that stuck out was rugosity. So rugosity is kind of a catch
all term for, I don't know, it's kind of rough looking.
And some species of Oridans of Primerica cure specifically were
being identified by this species is more rugose.
It has weirder cheekbones than the other one does.
So I wanted to look at this obviously.
And so I went to a bunch of different museums and I was
looking at the rugosity and I noticed that it looked quite a
lot like bite marks. There were big holes in these
cheekbones. Some of them have straight up
chunks that have been taken out of the cheekbone and the bone
has healed around it. So it's like you don't see the
spongy bone because the bone has healed a like divot in the
cheekbone, like a like 1/4 sized divot in a cheekbone.
It's just battle wounds, yeah. Battle wounds, yeah.
And these are pretty extensively concentrated on the cheekbones.
There's not really a lot of, there's a couple bite Marks and
a couple of holes and a little bit of rugosity in other places.
But like 90% of these injuries are directly on these giant
fucking cheekbones. And it turns out most of the
things that I saw and thought were bite marks were in fact not
bite marks. They are probably pus cloacas.
Face pus holes. Yeah, why don't you describe for
the audience what you see there? I appreciate so much your scale
bar and it's weird fucking nose. So I'm looking at a beautiful
Primericacaris skull. It's got quite the Is that a
sagittal Crest? Is that what you'd call that?
It is a sagittal Crest. They have a very big sagittal
Crest. They were.
It's good at. Biting they were pronounced and
it's got big ass fangs It's got very wide.
Oh like honestly, it's cheekbones remind me of a human
pelvis, right? Like a bowl shape kind of it's
kind of like that. That looks like an in a lot of
ways. And then on that zygomatic or
jugal, whatever part that is, there's like this pea sized hole
that looks like a. Scale bar, How big is it?
It's about 1 centimeter long, like in diameter there.
And yeah, it looks like it's trying to like gauge its
cheekbones or something like that.
But it it, yeah, it looks like you put it on there.
So you could like put this on like a necklace and you could
string it on a chain. Yeah.
So it's got about a centimeter wide hole and below it you can
see kind of like the the cheekbone has puffed up a little
bit. So that's a very clear sign of
osteomyelitis. There was infection inside of
that cheekbone. Question on that then.
So you're saying, OK, I thought these were bite marks, Now I
realize that they're pus drainage routes.
Could they be both? Is there a chance that.
I would imagine so. Path of least resistance.
Yeah. So the question is how does the
bacteria get into the body and why is it specifically going for
the cheekbones? So when I looked at, I think I
had like 50 or 60 primary care skulls and I wanted to only use
the ones that had cheekbones because that was the ones that
we were interested in is looking at their cheekbones.
But of the 50 or 60 primary care that had cheekbones, 40% of them
had some sort of filigree texture, whole chunks missing,
really big bulbous inflated bone, all on their cheekbones.
So something is biting them to 'cause this inflammation, and it
is really extensive. I don't know if that picture has
shown up yet. Yeah, but that's the underside
of the cheekbone. That thing was huge.
It was like, I don't know, like 3 centimeters wide because it
was so inflated and it has multiple pus drainage marks
because of course, it's not always just one.
And the reason that I concluded that these were pus drainage
Marks and not necessarily bite marks is kind of complex.
So when you have a skull get bitten, if it has a chance to
heal before death, you're going to get a very different
signature than if it just dies, right?
So if an ornod gets bit and it dies pretty quickly, you're
going to have a fairly clean puncture.
You'll often have what's called green bone fracturing where
you'll get like concoital fractures around the like the
hole and you won't have signs of bone remodeling.
It won't have smoothed itself out, you won't have additional
pits or anything. But if it is healed, you will
have a hole that has like some degree of like smoothing over.
What you won't have is big puffy bone and filigree texture that
is spreading out, you know, 5 centimeters away from the hole.
If you do have that, that's probably a good indication that
it is actually an infection because that's the bone
overreacting, right? That would be an overreaction.
I strongly suspect that a lot of these were actually caused by
bite marks. I don't know that necessarily.
The holes that we see are bite marks themselves that have been
Co opted into becoming pus drainages.
They're not bite marks that became cloacas necessarily, but.
But very. In order to get, it's very hard
to get a bone infection. It's not very common in people.
It's weirdly common in sheep, but that's one specific type.
But osteomyelitis is a general thing is not super, super
common. So basically my theory after
looking at all of these different animals with all of
these different injuries is I suspect that they were biting
each other and it was causing these massive faces infections
and that it was probably some sort of really poorly planned
dominance display. If you can bite your friends
face and make him injured and pussy, he doesn't really have a
whole lot of time or biological energy to concentrate on making
sperm or making time. Or to like get in your way
while. You're to get in your way.
Yeah. Yeah, but when you think about
it, 40% is really fucking high. Like that is a lot of these
animals that are actively sick at the time of death.
And you said though, when you were looking at modern stuff
like the bighorn sheep and whatnot, there were pretty high
percentages with that. So you know my next question,
which is related, I know part of this answer, but you know, we
talk a lot about sheep, pigs and camels with oriadons.
I know that camels do a lot of biting, right?
I think you've told me that. Are they all biters?
Are these all like kinky? I mean, I don't know what a
camel pigs really gets up to in its spare time.
Sheep definitely are not biters. Sheep are head butters.
We we have had sheep that are nippers.
But it's only if you're offering them food.
It's not like they're biting as a form of defense.
Camels definitely do bite each other and people, and they have
pretty nasty fangs. I have not seen bone infection
in any of the modern orc fossil camel skulls that I've looked
at. Interesting.
And I also don't see any animal in the modern record that has
cheekbones like this. Even if you look at things like
hippos, which do have pretty wide cheekbones, their
cheekbones are situated differently so that they can
drop their jaw open all the way. These cheekbones don't seem to
have improved the bite strength at all.
And unlike in hippos where the jaws kind of move outwards a
little bit with the expanding cheekbones.
So like everything is getting wider if you're a hippo with
these guys, only the zygomatic arches get wider.
The the jaw itself doesn't necessarily seem to expand.
So you have this really obvious like characteristic about this
Organism. It's got like there were some
actual bite marks, but most of these are like bite Marks and
infections. So for me that says something
about like this is maybe like antlers, essentially this is
section of the body that has been expanded for some reason
related to impressing others. But I also don't, I don't know,
like 40% is a really high percentage.
The other thing to keep in mind is that not all oridans die with
their zygomatic arches. So we might just be looking at
males, For example, if females didn't have as big or as thick
of zygomatic arches, maybe their zygomatic arches broke.
Maybe if you don't have bone infection that causes this weird
rapid growth, your zygomatic arches remain relatively small
and they are more likely to break.
So part of the reason that we're seeing 40% with these infections
might not mean that 40% of Oridans were running around like
zombies with pus draining down their faces.
It might just mean that the conditions of fossilization
tended to prefer those because they have more bone that you'd
have to get rid of. It's disgusting.
It is disgusting. Right.
And then also the fact that these are like the chunkiest of
the Orient. So that's going to help with
some Tafanomic stuff too, because they're going to just be
like more like, you know, more robust.
And. Maybe they could withstand all
the preservation processes better because they were the
biggest of the bigs and disgusting, disgusting or
people. They or they were just like
really into it. They were like, I like it when
my face is puffy. Yeah, I just don't if really you
have half of your population is walking around at any time with
pus face, that seems like a recipe for disaster.
And yes, they are extinct, but so are a lot of other Oriadons
that didn't have super obvious bone infections all of the time.
So I think that probably what we have in oriadons is a
combination of those nice big cheekbones make them attractive
to other things, but are also a convenient target.
And if you get bit that causes bone infection, and if you get
bone infection your bone is stronger for fossilization
purposes, you are miserable. This would not have been
present. Weirdly have not found a single
Orion with actinomycosis. Oh wait, And what?
What would that look like? Lumpy, lumpy jaw and it's only
usually in the jaw. Sometimes I think I've seen it a
little bit in the upper, but usually it's in the the mandible
and I have not seen that in any Orion.
Ha, they just did it this way. They their lumpy jaw was lumpy.
It might also be that they were browsers more than they were
grazers, and actinomycosis is a soil Organism, so maybe they
were just able to avoid it. But yeah, no cavities either.
Wow, wow. Wild.
That's almost like they were really healthy other than their
pus faces. Maybe you're just catching them
in their teenage years and these are just, they're like, you
know. Bone well, we did find several
juveniles that had these marks, so it's not something that is
exclusively limited to really big and wide skulls, which we
would assume are male. It does seem to.
Be. Impacting kids as well, so maybe
there's some little little shit head teenagers that we're
getting in on this action as well.
Right. Well, that sounds about right.
Bone heads. Pus heads.
So yeah, that's ornodons. I still need to finish writing
up that paper, but there were at least quite a few pus filled,
leaky faced ornods running around in the world when primary
Cacurus was alive. And if you want to see some of
them, not the living ones, obviously, they're dead.
The Carnegie Museum has some really beautiful displays, and
one of them includes 3 big Primerica Curious that died
together in a sandstorm. And they're cuddling, which is
really cute and sad. Yeah.
And they have a little bit of rugosity, but they also have
quite a lot of arthritis, actually.
So they were like old, older gentlemen and sandstorms like.
The old ladies just spooning. I think these ones were dudes.
They have pretty big wide psychomatic arches.
But maybe they were, maybe they were ladies.
We don't know. It's kind of, it's pretty much
impossible actually to tell whether they were actually
female or male. Maybe there were just some there
was some non sex related reason for getting your cheekbones that
big. I dare to dream.
I can just it was it was for like handles but they didn't
have hands, does it? Make any sense?
Yeah, They didn't have hands. They had, they had hooves.
So. Yeah.
Oh, God, that's gross. Yeah, I know when I've handled a
few of these specimens that I've always been like envisioning
what their head would have really looked like, you know, 30
million years ago or whatever. And that kind of grosses me out.
I don't get grossed out by a lot, but the idea of holding
like a pus filled bone is not not as I I like give me copper
all day every day, but pus filled bones.
That's that's gross. It's just like a, you know,
Cadbury egg from hell. It's.
Just disgusting. Oh my God, Amy.
Oh my. God, it's just, I wonder, wonder
what's inside. I know.
The cream, yeah. So not, not a species level
characteristic. In fact, if you look at a bunch
of Oridans from the same location at the same time,
you're going to have a variety, some that have pus faces, some
that do not. Because this is definitely
paleopathology. It's not.
Some of them had rough bone and some of them didn't.
Right. It is not a sign of right
different ancestry. It is it.
It could happen to it could happen to any of us.
Yeah, I'm going to bite someone's cheekbone.
Yeah. So that's Paleopus is it's good
to keep in mind that probably a lot of other Oregons did have
injuries, they just didn't necessarily get bone infections.
And that even though we see 40% that have bone infections, that
doesn't necessarily mean 40% at any given time.
We're just hanging out leaking pus, trying to impress the
ladies like it probably was some sort of other signature that is
preserving more than other things.
So thank you for sharing the oreodont absurdities of no, that
is the. Thing that we really cannot say
fussy, because deciding how to spell that is just not going to
fly. It's going to be something
totally different. Thanks all.