The sad and sorry story of Dolly the diseased and doomed dinosaur

[February 14, 2022]  By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a warm and humid Jurassic Period landscape lush with plant and animal life in what is now southwest Montana, an adolescent long-necked dinosaur was miserably sick with flu and pneumonia-like symptoms - probably feverish and lethargic with labored breathing, coughing, sneezing and diarrhea.

Some 150 million years later, the skeletal remains of that unfortunate beast, nicknamed "Dolly," represent the first-known dinosaur with evidence of respiratory illness - abnormal growths resembling fossilized broccoli on three neck bones that formed in response to an infection in air sacs linked to its lungs.

Scientists said on Thursday the dinosaur appears to have suffered from a fungal infection similar to aspergillosis, a common respiratory illness often fatal to modern birds and reptiles that sometimes causes bone infections. The condition may have killed Dolly, they said.

Dinosaurs suffered from maladies just like any other animals, but evidence is scarce in the fossil record because soft tissue rarely is preserved in a fossilization process that favors hard stuff like bone, teeth and claws. Dinosaur fossils previously have shown pathologies such as broken and healed bones , tooth abscesses, blood-borne infections affecting bone, arthritis and even bone cancer .

A handout illustration shows the elaborate and circuitous pulmonary complex of an individual sauropod dinosaur that lived 150 million years ago in what is now Montana, with the possible route of infection. Courtesy of Woodruff et al. (2022) and Corbin Rainbolt/Handout via REUTERS

Dolly belonged to a previously unknown species of sauropod dinosaur, a plant-eating group with long necks, long tails, small heads and four sturdy legs that included the largest land animals in Earth's history.

Dolly, about 60 feet (18 meters) long and weighing perhaps 4 to 5 tons, died at between 15 and 20 years of age, said Cary Woodruff, director of paleontology at the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in Malta, Montana and lead author of the study published in the journal Scientific Reports .

Similar sauropods generally reached adulthood in their late 20s.

"Poor Dolly. She probably felt terrible with all the same signs and symptoms of a lower respiratory infection that we experience, such as fever, tightness in the chest, labored breathing, a productive cough - eew!" said anatomist and study co-author Lawrence Witmer of the Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine.

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