Sauro-throat, Part 4: the osteological paradox

I closed the last post by claiming that finding the infected bone in Dolly was “a crazy lucky break”. Here’s why:

Another point made by Wood et al. (1992) concerns our perceptions of frailty and robustness. They were talking about archaeological populations, mostly from cemeteries, but the point is equally valid for non-human animals. We could look at Dolly and her infected vertebrae and say, “Ah, poor Dolly, she was too frail to fight off the infection” — implicitly comparing her to the individuals in the three left columns of the cartoon, which either never got sick, never developed lesions, or fully recovered. Or we could say, “Look how tough Dolly was, she must have survived with this infection for years!” — implicitly comparing her to the individuals in the right-most column, which all died too fast to develop lesions in the first place. The heck of it is, we can’t tell those comparison groups apart. Both stories about Dolly are true…from a certain point of view.

As a parting shot, here’s something to think about: a lot of the big mounted sauropod skeletons in museums are from individuals that are not skeletally mature — so they didn’t die of old age — and they also lack any evidence that they were killed by predators or even scavenged. There are some dramatic tooth-marked sauropod bones out there (f’rinstance), but not among the “monographically prominent” specimens like CM 3018 (Apatosaurus louisae), AMNH 5761 (Camarasaurus supremus), and MB.R.2181 (Giraffatitan brancai). I wonder how many of the latter were brought down by disease or parasites, and just don’t have any diagnostic traces of the maladies that killed them? Maybe the world’s museums are full of right-column sauropods.

References

• Wood, J.W., Milner, G.R., Harpending, H.C., Weiss, K.M., Cohen, M.N., Eisenberg, L.E., Hutchinson, D.L., Jankauskas, R., Cesnys, G., Česnys, G. and Katzenberg, M.A. 1992. The osteological paradox: problems of inferring prehistoric health from skeletal samples [and comments and reply]. Current Anthropology 33(4): 343-370.
• Woodruff, D. Cary, Wolff, Ewan D.S., Wedel, Mathew J., Dennison, Sophie, and Witmer, Lawrence M. 2022. The first occurrence of an avian-style respiratory infection in a non-avian dinosaur. Scientific Reports 12, 1954. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-05761-3