Did/could dinosaurs get cancer?
Yes, indeed. Fossilized dinosaur skeletons have been found showing clear evidenceof osteosarcomas (bone cancers). There are also skulls that show evidence consistent with myeloma, although in this case the diagnosis is much more equivocal.
I have no idea and I’m not sure anyone ever could know unless it was some form of bone cancer that would be apparent in a fossil.
That said IIRC sharks do not get cancer of any sort and as such are a subject for research to see why not. Given that sharks were hanging about with the dinosaurs that may constitute a tiny bit of anecdotal evidence that dinosaurs did not get cancer (I realize that this is in no way convincing evidence…just a nudge in that direction).
More appropriately would be to know if alligators and/or crocodiles get cancer since they are among the only living descendants of dinosaurs that I know of.
In light of Akatsukami’s post my post is mostly meaningless. (In my defense that post wasn’t there when I started writing but it doesn’t change the end result…)
That would be birds, btw…the ancestors of alligators and crocodiles split off from the tree that produced dinosaurs before dinosaurs got there.
I would be surprised if there were any DNA-based life that didn’t get cancer sometimes. The “sharks don’t get cancer” thing was disproved, right?
Not only disproved, there was never any evidence it was true.
Ever since people have been bothering to examine sharks in detail they knew they developed cancers. The “sharks don’t get cancer” line was popularised in the late eighties/early nineties by witch-doctors trying to sell people shark cartilage as a cancer preventative. Even by that stage it was well known that sharks developed tumours. Legitimate medical scientists had succeded in extracting anti-cancer drugs from shark cartilage. These killed tumours by cutting off the blood supply but they needed to be injected, and no legitimate authority had suggested that sharks were immune to cancer. Since then there have been examples found of sharks with cancer of the cartilage. So much for the anti-cancer properties of shark cartilage.
Sharks do develop fewer cancers than most animals for a number of reasons.
So Deep Blue Sea wasn’t a documentary? I’m shocked 