A team of researchers, who studied a 150-million-year-old marine reptile called pliosaur, found the beast was apparently afflicted with an arthritis-like disease.
The carnivore, which was unearthed in 1994 and since held in the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery in England, was a 26-feet old female with a 10-foot-long crocodile-like head, whale-like body, short neck and four powerful flippers to propel it through water to hunt down prey.
"This pliosaur, like many of its relatives, was truly huge," researcher Michael Benton, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England, told LiveScience.
"To stand beside its skull and realise that it is three meters long, and massive and heavy as it is, that it once functioned with muscles and blood vessels and nerves, is amazing. You can lie down inside its mouth."
The researchers, who detailed their finding in the journal Palaeontology, observed that the skeleton of the beast had a low ridge of bone running from front to back on top of its skull and also noticed the reptile had signs of a degenerative condition similar to human arthritis.
"The most exciting aspect of this research for me is the arthritic condition, which has never been seen before in these or similar Mesozoic reptiles," said researcher Judyth Sassoon from the University of Bristol.
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The degenerative condition, according to the researchers, had eroded the pliosaur's left jaw joint that would have knocked its lower jaw askew.
"In the same way ageing humans develop arthritic hips, this old lady developed an arthritic jaw and survived with her disability for some time," Sassoon said.
"But an unhealed fracture on the jaw indicates that at some time the jaw weakened and eventually broke. With a broken jaw, the pliosaur would not have been able to feed, and that final accident probably led to her demise." (More)