Nigersaurus had a extraordinary dental battery consisting of about 500 slender, carefully packed teeth, arranged in rows along its large, flat jaw.
Nigersaurus is really a thirty-foot-prolonged plant-having dinosaur that lived one hundred ten million yrs in the past in what is now Niger’s Sahara Desert. Nigersaurus lived in a very lush environment together with the predatory dinosaur Suchomimus, the plant eaters ouranosaurus and lurdusaurus, and supercroc. Nigersaurus had a delicate cranium and an extremely huge mouth lined with teeth especially adapted for browsing crops near the ground.
Daily life restoration Nigersaurus was unique in that its dorsal (back again) vertebrae experienced paired pneumatic Areas at the base in the neural spines (the spines that projected upwards within the vertebrae). The presacral vertebrae (vertebrae before the sacrum) were being closely pneumatised to the point wherever the column consisted of the series of hollow "shells", Just about every divided by a skinny septum in the middle. It had tiny to no cancellous bone, making the centra thin bone plates filled with air Areas. The vertebral arches were being so greatly pierced by extensions in the external air sacs that of their facet walls small remained but 2 mm (0.
It's believed that these sauropod dinosaurs gathered food stuff working with their massive, broad mouths, similar to grazing in contemporary cows. They'd most likely have been “nonselective” inside their eating plan. 2. Nigersaurus was among the to start with dinosaurs to acquire a CT scan
There's been discussion on irrespective of whether its head was habitually held downwards, or horizontally like other sauropods. It lived in a very riparian habitat, and its eating plan likely consisted of soppy plants, such as ferns, horsetails, and angiosperms. It is actually One of the more common fossil vertebrates found in the region, and shared its habitat with other dinosaurian megaherbivores, in addition to significant theropods and crocodylomorphs.
This sauropod (prolonged-necked dinosaur) has an uncommon skull that contains as a lot of as 500 slender teeth. An important purpose of this expedition is to uncover the remainder of this abnormal dinosaur so we could explain it and reconstruct it for everybody to determine.
We thoroughly brushed the sand from the a hundred and ten million-calendar year-outdated bones and dug channels concerning the major parts of the skeleton. Before long we will protect Each individual region in plaster so the skeleton is often transported outside of the field and back again on the laboratory.
Its skull was incredibly specialised for feeding. It had four huge side fenestrae, openings in the skull and slender bones. It experienced a wide muzzle filled with more than five hundred teeth, which were being changed all around every single 14 days. The jaws might have had a keratinous sheath, something like a large beak. Nigersaurus is the only real recognised tetrapod 500 teeth dinosaur animal to obtain experienced jaws broader when compared to the cranium and teeth that extended laterally through the entrance.
This revelation originates from The point that, Regardless of its elongated nostrils, the olfactory (smelling) area of its Mind was somewhat little for its dimension. eleven. Nigersaurus could probably see almost 360 degrees though feeding
One for probably the most unique capabilities of your Nigersaurus was its teeth. It has 500 teeth! They had been peg-like and adapted for grazing on plants.
This bizarre, extended-necked dinosaur is characterised by its unusually broad, straight-edged muzzle tipped with much more than five hundred replaceable teeth. The initial fossil skull of Nigersaurus is probably the initially dinosaur skulls to become digitally reconstructed from CT scans.
The constrained comprehension of the genus was the results of weak preservation of its continues to be, which arises in the delicate and very pneumatic development (stuffed with air spaces connected to air sacs) from the skull and skeleton, consequently resulting in disarticulation of your fossils. Some of the skull fossils were so skinny that a powerful mild beam was seen through them. As a result, no intact skulls or articulated skeletons are already observed, and these specimens characterize quite possibly the most complete known rebbachisaurid continues to be.[three][one]
Wafer-thin fossils with slender bone plates are not the simplest items to protect and examine. But dag nabit, a person's gotta get it done!
The Nigersaurus was a floor-stage browser. Its broad muzzle, coupled with its quite a few teeth, allowed it to soak up large amounts of vegetation in a single Chunk. The orientation of its teeth, all positioned on the entrance of its jaws, enabled it to proficiently crop and Obtain food near the ground.