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 Triassic period.

The femur is now housed in the state museum for natural history in Stuttgart, the authors write in JAMA Oncology.