Ruminations

Bioarchaelogy Sleuthing

"When it comes to our understanding of cancer in the past, we're really just at the beginning."
"[This new find has importance to enable scientists to learn more relating to cancer in vertebrates]."
"On the subject of our understanding of most cancers up to now, we’re actually [just at the starting gate]."
"It’s not like individuals say, ‘Oh, I need to go research most cancers in historic turtles or in fossil mammoths,’ as a result of [which] we've got so little proof."
Michaela Binder, bioarchaeologist, Austrian Archaeological Institute

Cancer was found on examination of a femur of an excavated Pappochelya Brian Engh

"What makes this really cool is that now we understand that cancer is basically a deeply rooted switch that can be turned on or off. It's not something that happened recently in our evolution."
"It's not something that happened early in human history, or even in mammal history."
Yara Haridy, paleontologist, National History Museum, Berlin

The fossil record hasn't exactly been a cornucopia of discovery in traces of cancer in early animals during evolutionary stages of existence. Researchers, however, writing in JAMA Oncology on February 7 revealed the discovery of cancer on an ancient femur of a 240-million-year-old precursor to modern turtles, an amniote, a group including reptiles, birds and mammals.

The 240 million-year-old fossilized leg bone of an ancient stem turtle that revealed signs of bone cancer.

Brian Engh/dontmesswithdinosaurs.com/Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin

It was described as representing the oldest known instance of cancer in an ancient creature. Cancers that surface in the present day are diagnosed through soft-tissue examination (biopsies), but such diagnosis is difficult working with hard fossils. The femur was identified when it was collected for the Stuttgart State Museum of National History in Germany as belonging to a wide-bodied, long-tailed animal called a Pappochelys, a relative of modern turtles but lacking a shell.

The jagged growth on the femur aroused the interest of Yara Haridy, with Berlin's Natural History Museum. She identified the marks as indications that illness and injury had been involved, those marks drawing the attention of bioarchaeologists in the study of paleopathology, combining aspects of modern forensic and medical practices. When the femur was examined through micro-CT scans Ms. Haridy and her colleagues identified the swelling as an osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer.

Up to the present, prehistoric cancer knowledge suffered from a lack of evidence, leading researchers to conjecture that the disease represents a purely modern phenomenon, the result of unhealthy living; pollution, or individuals becoming 'older' in biological terms. On the other hand, other specialists suggest the presence possibly of a tumour-suppressive gene present in vertebrates, the failure of which permits tumours of a benign nature to metastasize.

With no fossil evidence there was no available proof that either theory could be hitting the mark. Furthermore, some animal lineages appear to be less susceptible to cancer than others. On the other hand, tumours in invertebrates tend not to resemble those appearing in vertebrates.

IN 2001, Russian paleontologists identified a possible cranial osteosarcoma in an Early Triassic amphibian, as an example of other finds of recent vintage. Yet again, a jaw tumour from a 255-million-year-old mammal forerunner had been reported in 2016.