Paleopathologies are features of an organism and its interaction with the environment and should not be treated like organisms unto themselves

Abstract

Though the history of disease has an evolutionary history in itself, this history of pathologies, which are physical manifestations of immune responses to disease processes, has a history that is intimately linked to the history of the host organisms themselves. But many of these physical manifestations of an organism's response to disease are related to aspects of the immune system that are rooted so deeply in the phylogeny of vertebrates, or at least amniotes, that one must exercise caution when interpreting a pathology as novel. Here, we argue that the interpretation of paleopathologies must be founded on the basis of disease manifestations which relate to phylogeny, but recognise that much of this relationship is so deeply rooted that novel paleopathologies would be rare. The former presents an interesting speculation, but does not allow for placement of findings within an ecological and chronological context. Likewise, the assignment of specimens as paleopathological holotypes defeats this purpose in attempting to narrowly define the physical manifestation of the immune response to disease, doing nothing more than a photographic library of paleopathologies could do, but not conveying the true nature of paleopathologies and could lead to artificial classification schemes that would cause more confusion than clarity.

Keywords:

• classification; homology
• immune response
• paleopathology
• phylogenetic influence