![]() ![]() "But you would need to perform an X-ray to determine if something was hidden inside the bone. "About one-third of cancers will show themselves," Rothschild said. However, even if cancer is present in a fossil, it often isn't visible to the naked eye and takes further examination to find - which was the case for the toe bone. "Bone is one of the few tissues that can survive in the fossil record," Bruce Rothschild (opens in new tab), a vertebrate paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. It's not surprising that the oldest known cancer case was in a bone, since organs, skin and other soft tissues are more prone to decay than bones are. An even older benign tumor was found in a 1.9 million-year-old human relative known as Australopithecus sediba found in South Africa, according to a separate 2016 study in the South African Journal of Science (opens in new tab). ![]()
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