This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Emily Schwing."Given that hundreds of thousands of dinosaur bones have been dug up, is there any evidence that dinosaurs got cancer?"David Evans, senior curator of paleontology at the Royal Museum of Ontario in Toronto."There had been a few studies that had kind of suggested, based on gross anatomy, that dinosaurs might have gotten cancer.But there was nothing compelling from a medical standpoint.And from that point on, we decided to go on a hunt for rare dinosaur diseases, in particular cancer."So in 2017, Evans and colleagues went digging through a collection of dinosaur bones at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta―a hotbed of dinosaur fossils."And out of the hundreds of dinosaur bones that we looked at, we found one that was a candidate for bone cancer."The bone specimen Evans and his colleagues found comes from a dinosaur that roamed western Canada between 70 and 75 million years ago.The creature is called a Centrosaurus."Centrosaurus is a horned dinosaur. It's about the size of a rhinoceros, and it's a close cousin of the famous triceratops, so it looked very similar.It would have a parrot-like beak at the end of its large skull. It had a neck shield similar to triceratops and walked around on four feet and ate plants."
