I’d bet you said the elderly. Arthritis is a condition which primarily affects the older people amongst us – this is true. Saying that though, around ¼ of arthritic people in the world today are under 65 and a good proportion of those are children so the condition isn’t just specific to the elderly. It could feasibly affect anyone or indeed anything…
The Bristol City Museum’s a fantastic place to wander around, it’s free and is packed full of some great exhibits which you can enjoy to your heart’s content. This is what Dr Judyth Sassoon of Bristol University used to enjoy doing and she was especially interested in the massive eight metre long pliosuarus skeleton. This big beasty used to ply the oceans with a jaw like an oversized crocodile and a body like a blue whale. You wouldn’t want to get bitten by one of these creatures, there’d be nothing left of you afterwards!
That is of course, providing the pliosaurus trying to snack on you had arthritis in its jaw. According to Dr Sassoon, the dinosaur skeleton on display in the museum showed degradation in the joints of its jaw remarkably similar to that which occurs in cases of arthritis. What this means is that this titanic monster may have suffered from a condition which we today know too well. The likelihood is that it would have eventually died for this very reason as, if it lost mobility in its jaw then it wouldn’t have been able to feed properly. No food makes a dino very, very dead.
It’s interesting to see the conditions that we suffer from today echoed in the creatures of bygone eras in our planets history. It just goes to show that, even though nature is infinitely imaginative in the things it produces, there is the occasional recurrence, even if it takes hundreds of millions of years!
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