Dinosaurs could take tough breaks

Meat-eating dinosaurs may have survived some extremely tough breaks. Detailed chemical maps of 150 million-year-old Allosaurus fragilis bones suggest that the two-legged meat-eater could recover from gruesome skeletal injuries, researchers report May 7 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. The team compared the chemical analysis of the dinosaur’s bones to those of a turkey vulture and identified zinc as a possible marker of fractures and breaks that had healed. Together with other methods, the technique could reveal how bone once healed in now-extinct species, the scientists say.