Science Alert has a piece about dinosaurs… sauropods might not have been all that healthy. The animals that lived in what is now Brazil, might have suffered from bone infections caused by bacterium, fungus, virus, or parasite.

“There have been few findings of infectious diseases in sauropods, the first having been published recently,” says lead author and paleontologist Tito Aureliano from the Regional University of Cariri (URCA) in Brazil.

“The bones we analyzed are very close to each other in time and from the same palaeontological site, which suggests that the region provided conditions for pathogens to infect many individuals during that period.”

The precious fossils of unspecified species were collected between 2006 and 2023 at the “Vaca Morta” site in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo.

Because none of the bone lesions show evidence of healing, the infections were probably still active at the time of death. They may even have contributed.

Based on the disease pathology, Aureliano and colleagues argue that the bone infection advanced quickly. Unlike dinosaur bite marks, the bone lesions possess a “chaotic architecture“.