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This week we answer a question you probably didn't ask, did dinosaurs ever get sick? The answer is yes (or else it would be a super short episode). (Thanks to Llewelly for some corrections!)\n\nA big birthday shout-out to Gwendolyn! Have a great birthday!\n\nThe unlocked Patreon episode about green puppies\n\nFurther reading:\n\nResearchers discover first evidence indicating dinosaur respiratory infection\n\nSauro-throat, Part 3: what does Dolly's disease tell us about sauropods?\n\nDinosaurs got cancer\n\nGiant Dinosaur Had 2 Tumors on Its Tailbone\n\nDinosaurs got sick, too--but from what?\n\ncough cough:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\nThis week we have a dinosaur episode, but not one you may expect. We\u2019re going to learn about some dinosaur fossils found with evidence of sickness to answer the question, did dinosaurs get sick? Yes, they did. Otherwise this episode would be about two minutes long.\nI know some people get squicked when they hear about illness and disease, so I\u2019ve also unlocked a Patreon episode about puppies that are born green. Don\u2019t worry, the puppies are fine! There\u2019s a link in the show notes so you can click through and listen to the episode on your browser, no login needed.\nBefore we get to the dinosaurs, we have a birthday shout-out! Happy birthday to Gwendolyn, who is turning two years old this week! Oh my gosh, Gwendolyn, you\u2019re going to learn so many new things this year! I hope you have a wonderful birthday.\nAnd now, the dinosaurs.\n\nJust a few days ago as this episode goes live, researchers announced that they\u2019d found the fossilized remains of a young sauropod dinosaur. It lived around 150 million years ago in what is now the United States, specifically in southwestern Montana. The fossil was nicknamed Dolly by the paleontologists who studied it.\nDolly was a sauropod in the family Diplodocidae,\xa0and like other sauropods the Diplodocids all had huge neck vertebrae because their necks were so long. The bones weren\u2019t solid, though, but contained air sacs that made the bones lighter and also connected to the respiratory system. This is the case in birds too. Technically the air sacs in the bones are called pneumatic diverticula, but that\u2019s hard to say so I\u2019m just going to call them air sacs.\nWhen a bird breathes, instead of its lungs inflating and deflating, the air sacs throughout its body and bones inflate and deflate. This pumps fresh air through the lungs and allows the bird to absorb a lot more oxygen with every breath than most mammals can.\nThe bones of Dolly\u2019s neck had unusual bony protrusions around the spaces where the air sacs once were. When the paleontologists made a CT scan of the protrusions they discovered they were abnormal bone growths that probably resulted from an infection. Sauropods share a common ancestor with birds and researchers think they might have sometimes caught a respiratory illness similar to aspergillosis [asper-jill-OH-sus], a disease common in birds and reptiles today.\nDolly would have had a fever, difficulty breathing, coughing, a sore throat, and other symptoms familiar to us as flu-like or pneumonia-like. Aspergillosis can be fatal in birds, so this respiratory infection might have actually been what killed Dolly. I think we can all agree that the worst symptom to have as a sauropod, whose necks were as much as 30 feet long, or 9 meters, is a sore throat.\nThat\u2019s not the only indication of illness in a dinosaur fossil, of course. A 2003 paper published in Nature detailed the results of a study where paleontologists scanned 10,000 dinosaur vertebrae from over 700 animals to see if any of them showed tumors. They found 97 individuals that did, all of them from around 70 million years ago and all of them hadrosaurs. Those are the duck-billed dinosaurs that were common in the late Cretaceous in many parts of the world, especially in what is now North America and Asia.