Unveiling the Secret Life of Dinosaurs with Latest CT Techniques

Canon Medical is helping a team of researchers in Belgium examine a 125 million-year-old dinosaur’s skeleton, offering unique insights into the behavior and health of those ancient animals who mysteriously disappeared 66 million years ago. Dinosaurs were fierce creatures who roamed the Earth over 200 million years ago. But just as most other life forms on this planet, they had their share of diseases, including cancer, infections, and maybe even common arthritis, a researcher at the Belgian Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels believes.

Paleontologist Filippo Bertozzo is in charge of digitalising the museum’s impressive dinosaur collection, which includes 30 iguanodons excavated in a coal mine in Bernissart close to the border with France nearly 150 years ago. Bertozzo is investigating one of the largest specimens of the group, a seven-meter long individual presenting with an unusual set of vertebrae.

In a recent interview with VISIONS, Bertozzo explained how he first came across the odd piece when working on his PhD a few years ago. "I studied dinosaurs’ lesions, pathologies, tumors and infectious diseases, especially in animals connected with Iguanodons, those large herbivorous dinosaurs who lived in the Lower Cretaceous," he recalled. "I noticed a specimen who presented with a potentially very interesting disease in two vertebrae.

Instead of being separated, as they usually should, the vertebrae were encapsulated in a bony overgrowth below the vertebral body." Back then it was impossible to take the piece without dismantling the whole skeleton. But now with his new role at the Brussels museum, Bertozzo has been able to further investigate this curious anatomic part. He also met with Anne Schulp, Professor of

Vertebrate Paleontology at Utrecht University and researcher with Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands who regularly cooperates with Canon Medical and uses the facility in the headquarters in Zoetermeer, The Netherlands.

Prof. Schulp contacted John van Gulik, European Clinical Market Manager CT at Canon Medical Systems Europe, who invited the young researcher to image the piece on the Aquilion ONE / PRISM Edition scanner in Zoetermeer. The interpretation of the CT scan will help Bertozzo confirm his suspicions.

"I still have to get to the bottom of it, but I think it’s arthritis spondylitis," he said. "Imaging expands the possibilities for paleontologists to understand what happened to a dinosaur and make a more accurate diagnosis.

Most of the time, we need to have an internal view of the disease. With dinosaurs, we usually have only bone, there's no blood nor genome, and soft tissues are extremely rare. Bones from the outside don’t always tell you what the pathology was. Sometimes, with an inner view with MR, with CT or another medical imaging method, we can get new information."

Potential impact in paleontology

"The new results could help improve our understanding of dinosaurs’ lifestyle, which remains elusive to this day," Bertozzo explained. "Behavior has always been in the realm of speculation because we only had fossils and you can’t understand how dinosaurs lived only with bones. But now with paleopathology, we’re starting to have more and more data that give us more clues."

For example, researchers recently found out that Triceratopses, the famous three-horned dinosaurs, were sparring against each other just as rhinoceroses do. "Pathologists found fractures and perforations in the shields made by other specimens’ horns." .

Researchers now know that the Pachycephalosaurus, a dinosaur who had a very thick head, was head-to-head fighting with his peers, just like sheep or other animals with horns or antlers.

Recent research has also shown that Tyrannosauruses were biting each other in the lower jaw, possibly for mating or territoriality. Bertozzo’s findings will add to the already amazing story of the Bernissart Iguanodons’ fossils, which miners first took for gold due to the formation of pyrite, a shiny, yellow mineral that formed on ancient worms after their deaths and preserved fossils while giving them a gold-like appearance - a phenomenon commonly known as fools’ gold.

The Bernissart Iguanodons have a special place in paleontology history and they are regarded as the first significant discovery in terms of our perception of those mysterious creatures.

"Before the Bernissart dinosaurs were found, people didn’t really have a precise idea of what dinosaurs looked like," Bertozzo explained. "They had found dinosaur scatter material in England before, but Belgian dinosaurs are a bit more important in the realisation of what they were. Paleopathology is fascinating, a photograph in the ancient life of these dinosaurs." There’s no doubt that Canon Medical can help push future advances in that field. //

Filippo Bertozzo is a paleontologist and scicommer. He is currently working at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science (RBINS) as a postdoc researcher on the BRAIN-BELSPO project, aiming to digitize the holotype of Iguanodon bernissartensis and the skeleton of Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis.

In 2009, Bertozzo enrolled at the course of Natural Sciences at the University in Bologna, and joined his first dinosaur expedition with Dr. Fabio Marco Dalla Vecchia and the Institut Català de Paleontologia in the Tremp Basin on the Pirenei Mountains, digging Maastrichtian hadrosaurids. He was later offered the possibility to review the Ouranosaurus skeleton, the same dinosaur that had triggered his interest in paleontolgy as a child, for his thesis.

After graduating, he enrolled at the Organismic Biology, Evolution and Paleobiology (OEP) Master Program in Bonn, Germany under the supervision of Prof. Martin Sander. His Master’s thesis focused on the paleohistological analysis of pneumatized bone in sauropod dinosaurs, in which he identified a new soft-tissue called “pneumosteum”. With Prof. Sander, he joined an expedition to the Nevada Desert in 2015, digging and moving the skeleton of a giant ichthyosaur found some years before in the Augusta Mountains. Recently, this skeleton has been described as Cymbospondylus youngorum.

After one year spent as a researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium Filippo moved to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to complete his PhD program on ornithopod paleopathology with Prof. Eileen Murphy, Dr. Alastair Ruffell and the external supervision of Dr. Pascal Godefroit from RBINS.

His project, founded by the Marie-Curie Horizon 2020 Program, aimed to build a large database of fossilized lesions and diseases from the ornithopod collections of several museums. He completed his doctoral degree in September 2021.

He had the privilege to study the famous skeleton of Parasaurolophus walkeri exhibited in Toronto, suggesting that the peculiar morphology of his back was caused by a traumatic impact with an external object. Through their analysis, Bertozzo and his team were able to reconstruct the neck morphology of the species and the other hadrosaurs, proving the potential of the field of paleopathology.

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