Dinosaurs could hold key to cancer discoveries, UK scientists say

LONDON - Dinosaur fossils could hold the key to new cancer discoveries and influence future treatments for humans, scientists have said, PA Media/dpa reported.

In a new study published in the journal Biology, which was almost a decade in the making, researchers from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and Imperial College London identified preserved red blood cell-like structures in a dinosaur fossil.

The findings raised the possibility that prehistoric creatures could be used to study ancient tumours, helping to fill in the "jigsaw” of cancer’s molecular building blocks, and potentially influencing future treatments for humans.

The idea for the study began when Professor Justin Stebbing, an oncologist at ARU, was reading the news in 2016 and came across an article about the discovery of a new fossil in Romania with a tumour in its jaw.

The remains were those of a Telmatosaurus transsylvanicus, a duck-billed, plant-eating "marsh lizard”, a specimen that had lived between 66-70 million years ago in the Hateg Basin in present-day Romania. - BERNAMA-PA Media/dpa