Dinosaurs Developed Incredibly Fast Bone-Healing Defense Mechanism

A study released this week shows that dinosaurs were able to withstand and heal from devastating injuries that would easily kill a modern human or other mammals, without any assistance from medical care.

While this should come as no surprise given how large and tough dinosaurs were in the Jurassic period, scientists have never been able to study injuries dinosaurs went through in detail until recently.

"It seems dinosaurs evolved a splendid suite of defense mechanisms to help regulate the healing and repair of injuries," said Dr. Phil Manning, researcher at Manchester's School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, according to a Manchester University press release. "The ability to diagnose such processes some 150 million years later might well shed new light on how we can use Jurassic chemistry in the 21st Century."

Manning is the co-author of the new study, which was published in the Royal Society journal Interface.  

Manning and his fellow paleontologists at Manchester University, in England, employed a new type of imaging technology to show that dinosaurs suffered from trauma and sickness.

The technology also shows subsequent signs of healing, preserved within dinosaur bones, according to the study.

"Using synchrotron imaging, we were able to detect astoundingly dilute traces of chemical signatures that reveal not only the difference between normal and healed bone, but also how the damaged bone healed," said Manning.

Study co-author Jennifer Anné said that the synchrotron-based imaging has helped researchers understand new things about the way bones heal, even human bones.

The synchrotron-based imaging focuses a light 10 billion times brighter than the sun, according to the study.

Click here to check out the study.

Before the new technology, scientists could only record morphological bone observations by manually slicing out a thin section. This limits a researcher's perspective, while also "blurring the broader picture," according to UPI.com.

"It's exciting to realize how little we know about bone, even after hundreds of years of research," Anné said, according to the press release. "The fact that information on how our own skeleton works can be explored using a 150-million-year-old dinosaur just shows how interlaced science can be."