16
Friday, April 24, 1987 / University Daily Kansan
The bends is a painful condition that usually occurs in divers. It is caused by ascending too rapidly from great depths to the surface where the pressure outside of the body lowers too rapidly. The nitrogen in the blood separates and forms into bubbles similar to the way bubbles of air form when water is heated to a boil. The bubbles clog the tiny passages and prevent blood from flowing to the living tissues.
t wasn't always easy being a giant marine lizard in prehistoric Kansas.
Mosaursa, the lizards,
could eat almost anything in
the water, including 20-foot-
long giant souls. They could
dive 400 to 500 feet. But tiny nitrogen bubbles gave them a pain in the neck, two KU researchers discovered recently.
Two kinds of mosasaurus, which lived to dive and dived to live, got the bends. Scuba divers get the bends when they surface too quickly and nitrogen bubbles form in their blood. It hurts. It can kill people.
But people can stay out of the water. Mosaaurs lived in the ocean that covered most of Kansas and the rest of the world at that time.
Source: Museum of Natural History
"At very best, they could only wallow on the shore," said Larry Martin, professor of systematics and ecology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Museum of National History.
North America during the Cretaceous Period Shallow seas covered the central U.S. about 70 million years ago
Martin and Bruce Rothschild, research associate at the museum, published a report on mosasaurus in the April 3 issue of Science magazine.
Mosaurs weren't just any diving marine reptiles. Their habits were similar to today's sperm whales, which have developed protection against the bends. Mosaurs were predators that could grow as big as 40 feet long.
"I wouldn't want to swim with one." Martin said. They probably didn't get the bends routinely while chasing food.
"Sometimes they had emergency ascents, like when they met a bigger masosaur," he said. "It may have been special times when they had this sort of accident. I hope so, for their sake. It must have been a very painful lifestyle."
Evolution wasn't kind to the mosasaurus, but they may have learned to live with it. Martin said
Mosaasaurus lived from about 100 million years ago to about 64 million years ago. The bends weren't the death of the mosasaurus, Martin said.
'Whatever killed the dinosaurs may very well have killed the moaasaur.' he said.
Rothschild said research didn't reveal exactly how the bends hurt mosaasaur. It may have
"Did they have strokes? If they had, then it obviously would not have been particularly helpful to their long-term survival," he said.
But masasaurus were fairly stupid, so brain damage might not have left them much worse off, he said.
Rothschild said he wasn't sure why reptiles that lived in the water and dove for their food were unable to adapt to rapid aspersions. Similar traits are evidently are unable to adapt to sickle cell anemia.
But sickle cell anemia is a symptom of something that protects humans from malaria. The bends may have been a symptom of something that protected mosaasaurs from another environmental hazard, he said.
"I think this really scratches the surface and emphasizes how little we know about marine physiology." he said.
Martin and Rothschild studied more than 1,000 mosasaur vertebrae, mostly found near Hays. They found evidence of a bone disease that, as far as they know, could only be caused by radiation, metallic poisoning or the bends.
No evidence existed of poisoning or radiation, Martin said. They found the disease in every member of two kinds of mosaurs.
"It's a surprising thing to find," he said. "People have generally thought that diving marine reptiles wouldn't get the bends."
The study has caused a little stir among scientists after its publication. Martin said. Its conclusions run against conventional wisdom.
"I thought it was extremely unlikely that a diving reptile that is carrying air in it could get enough nitrogen to get the bends," he said.
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