Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The World's Earliest Known Toothache

Scientists find dinosaur fossil with "fossil toothache"
An elderly reptile living approximately 275 million years ago in what is now Oklahoma was probably walking around with a throbbing mouth, suggests a new study finding evidence of what may be the world's first known toothache.

The find predates the previous record-holder (another land vertebrate with dental disease) by nearly 200 million years. The newly discovered tooth infection may have been the result of animals adapting to life on land after living in the sea for so long. [Images of decaying jawbone]...
Not terribly surprising.  I find sharks teeth with damage to the growth buds that must have come from some sort of infection or injury to the tissue that produces the tooth.  They're nowhere near that old, but shark predate dinosaurs, so I suspect that's been going on a lot longer.  This is one of those cases of a scientists trying to make a bigger deal out of something than it deserves for the publicity. 

I'll bet a dinosaur with a toothache is irritable.  I wonder how the dinobabes handled that...




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