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Exciting discovery: The researchers discovered the first evidence of the existence of viruses. Over 289 million years ago, the vertebrae of a lizard-like animal revealed signs of a bone disease much like that of Paget's disease. It is generally thought that this condition is caused by viral agents, making it the most ancient discovery of indirect evidence of viruses in the history of the Earth.
Whether it is AIDS, smallpox or Ebola: most of the major diseases and most deadly diseases have been and are caused by viruses. These tiny life forms have existed since time immemorial and may have even struck dinosaurs. But when exactly the first viruses developed on our planet are still uncertain.
Lizard with welded vertebrae
Yara Haridy, of the Berlin Natural History Museum, and her colleagues made an even more exciting discovery: paleontologists have discovered the earliest evidence of the existence of viral pathogens – in a fossil-shaped lizard. Discovered in a cave of Oklahoma, the discovery is a representative of the Varanopidae, relatives of the earliest ancestors of reptiles and mammals.
On the animal aged 289 million years, only two caudal vertebrae are preserved, which immediately aroused the interest of scientists. Because the bones had grown strangely. That's why Haridy and his team took a closer look at the vertebrae with the help of computed tomography. They were able to examine both the external and internal structure of the invaded bones.
Diagnosis: Paget's disease
The results revealed signs of bone disease. For example, bones had become very thin in some places, while in other places excessive bone growth had resulted in abnormal thickening. This eventually led to the fusion of the two vertebrae, as the researchers suspect.
The interesting thing about this: this discovery is similar to a still known bone metabolic disease, the so-called Paget's disease. In this condition that occurs both in humans, but also in other modern mammals and reptiles, the coordination between the cells in formation and the cells in degradation is no longer effective. According to the current state of knowledge, the appearance of Paget's disease involves not only genetic factors, but also fiber-like viruses.
The oldest evidence of viral infection?
"The disease is still not completely understood, but finding similar symptoms in a primitive animal like this suggests that it is linked to a deeply rooted factor in our bone biology," says Haridy. Several years ago, researchers had discovered signs of Paget's disease in a dinosaur aged 150 million years in the Jurassic.
The new discovery now suggests that the origin of the disease could go back even further in the past. Already our first parents of the Permian period could have been sensitive to this metabolic disease. "Even though viruses were involved at the time, we also have to be the longest-standing proof of viral infection by far," say the scientists. (PLOS One, 2019, doi: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0219662)
Source: Berlin Natural History Museum / PLOS
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