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MANCHESTER, England, May 7 (UPI) -- A new study reveals that dinosaurs were able to withstand and heal from bone-crushing injuries -- the equivalent of which would surely kill humans and other mammals, absent immediate medical care. Of course, it's no surprise that the rough and tumble world of the Jurassic period featured grisly injuries. But until now, scientists hadn't been able to study those injuries in detail.
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As described in a new study published in the Royal Society journal Interface, paleontologists at Manchester University, in England, have employed a new type of imaging technology to reveal evidence of trauma and sickness, as well as subsequent signs of healing, preserved within dinosaur bones.
"Using synchrotron imaging, we were able to detect astoundingly dilute traces of chemical signatures that reveal not only the difference between normal and healed bone, but also how the damaged bone healed," explained Dr. Phil Manning, a researcher at Manchester’s School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences and co-author of the new study.
"It seems dinosaurs evolved a splendid suite of defense mechanisms to help regulate the healing and repair of injuries," Manning added. "The ability to diagnose such processes some 150 million years later might well shed new light on how we can use Jurassic chemistry in the 21st Century."
Co-author Jennifer Anné says the synchrotron-based imaging, which focuses a light 10 billion times brighter than the sun, has helped scientists understand new things about the way bones heal. Previously, scientists could only record morphological bone observations by physically slicing out a thin section, thus limiting a researcher's perspective and blurring the broader picture.
"It's exciting to realize how little we know about bone, even after hundreds of years of research," Anné said. "The fact that information on how our own skeleton works can be explored using a 150-million-year-old dinosaur just shows how interlaced science can be."
