Science / Medicine : Dinosaur Bone Probed for Cancer

A San Diego Naval Hospital physician believes a dinosaur bone he came across in a Utah museum may be evidence that the prehistoric creature had cancer. If Leon Goldman’s hunch can be verified, scientists say the 140-million-year-old bone would be the oldest known instance of cancer and the first demonstrated in dinosaurs.

Goldman has enlisted other researchers to inspect slivers of the bone. “This may tell us whether there was cancer in animals long before man came upon the scene,” said Goldman, 86, who teaches the use of medical lasers.

His interest centers on a 12-inch-long humerus, or arm bone, of an allosaurus, a four-ton creature that measured about 35 feet from nose to tail and stood 16 feet tall when walking on its back legs. The bone, which Goldman persuaded curators at the Provo, Utah, museum to give him, has an unusual cauliflower-shaped region the size of a human fist extending from one end.

The irregularity could be from a cancer called chondrosarcoma that developed in cartilage at the end of the bone. But it also may represent a benign growth or a chronic infection the animal developed from injury during fighting, said Dr. Roger Thorne, chief of spinal surgery at Scripps Clinic. Soft tissues of organisms decompose after death, so evidence of cancer in them would perish.