Imagine this: a dinosaur that lived over 66 million years ago might help us understand cancer today. Wild. 

But that's exactly what a group of scientists from the UK have been working on.

The start

It all started back in 2016 when Professor Justin Stebbing, a cancer expert, read a news article about a dinosaur fossil found in Romania. 

It wasn't just any fossil, this one had a tumor in its jaw. The dinosaur was a Telmatosaurus, a duck-billed, plant-eating creature that once roamed the ancient swamps (now Romania).

So he had an idea, "What if we could study this ancient tumor and learn something new about cancer?"

The journey

He teamed up with other researchers and even brought in a scientist from Sri Lanka. Together, they got permission to borrow the fossil and brought it back to the lab.

They used a super high-tech microscope to look inside the fossil and found structures that looked like red blood cells still preserved after millions of years.

The tumor in the dinosaur was also a type that humans can get too, called an ameloblastoma, a benign tumor that usually forms in the jaw.

The conclusion

This discovery opened up a whole new way to study cancer. 

Until now, fossils were mostly used to study bones and shells. But this research showed we can also look at soft tissues like the actual flesh of a tumor from millions of years ago.

With this, scientists hope to:

1. Understand how cancer has evolved over time

2. Learn how the environment affects cancer

3. Discover new clues that could lead to better treatments for humans