Osteosarcoma Triassic-style
Cancer is not a 'modern physiological defect'
8th February 2019
By Clare Pain
If your patients think cancer is a product of modern life, you can tell them about this: The oldest specimen of a case of osteosarcoma has just been identified – and it is 240 million years old.
Not that it has been found in a human – Homo sapiens has only been around for about 200,000 years.
The tumour has been identified in a fossil femur from a shell-less stem-turtle Pappochelys rosinea, looking much more like a lizard than a modern-day turtle, which was swimming in a sea over Germany in the middle
