If you’re reading the title and thinking that it’s a joke, well, it’s not. Researchers recently concluded that even those ferocious and imposing creatures, namely the dinosaurs, also had to suffer the consequences of a flu pandemic, according to The Sun.
The dinosaurs infected manifested symptoms that we humans are well-aware of: coughing, sneezing, as well as shivering. While there’s no indication that the huge beasts had any idea of how to treat such illness, as far as scientists know, they managed to survive the flu pandemic.
The Dolly diplodocus’ bones were conclusive enough
The researchers found out by exploring the bones of the Dolly diplodocus that dinosaurs had to deal with a flu pandemic roughly 150 million years ago. This means long before their extinction, which occurred about 90 million years later.
Dr. Cary Woodruff stated as The Sun quotes:
An infection like this has never been found in any dinosaur, so it gives us an exciting window into the past.
Millions of years ago, before the invention of vaccines and Lemsip, they suffered the same gross symptoms we’ve all felt.
The dinosaurs got extinct after a huge asteroid known as the Chicxulub impactor and measuring roughly 12 kilometers in diameter, collided with Earth tens of millions of years ago. The impact left behind enormous layers of dust and ashes that blocked the sunlight for hundreds of years. Thus, the plants couldn’t produce oxygen anymore for dinosaurs to breathe. The crater resulted from the collision measures roughly 124 miles wide, and it can be found beneath the Yucatan peninsula from Mexico.
Perhaps after more research on how the flu pandemic impacted the dinosaurs, we humans can learn something from the huge beasts on how to deal with such a scourge ourselves.