1126 Iguanodontia and Gideon Mantell: A 150 Million-Year-Old Tale of Scoliosis

INTRODUCTION: Gideon Algernon Mantell was born in England in 1790. At a young age he displayed great interest in the sciences, examining fossils and skeletons around his home in Sussex. This ultimately propelled him into the field of medicine after an apprenticeship with the general surgeon James Moore. METHODS: Throughout his later years, Mantell would be plagued by back pain. He began taking opium for pain control, which would ultimately take his life in 1852 after an overdose. Mantell’s autopsy would reveal transverse rotation of the vertebrae. William Adams, one of the physicians carrying out his post-mortem examination, would describe these findings in a 1854 paper. Adams would proceed to become a leading expert on scoliosis and is credited with the forward bending test that carries his name. RESULTS: Nearly 150 years later, Florian Witzmann and colleagues described hemivertebrae in an ornithopod dinosaur, Dysalotosaurus lettowvorbecki, that roamed Tanzania during the Jurassic period 150 million years ago. It was one of the earliest fossils describing a scoliotic deformity, and it was of the same clade of dinosaurs, Iguanodontia, Mantell first described. CONCLUSIONS: The man that was integral to the discovery of dinosaurs suffered from scoliosis, which his autopsy helped describe, while the clade of dinosaurs he discovered appear to demonstrate one of the earliest occurrences of scoliosis within the fossil record.