Nigersaurus experienced a exceptional dental battery consisting of roughly 500 narrow, closely packed teeth, arranged in rows along its large, flat jaw.
They consisted of vertically stacked columns of replaceable teeth. Each time the very best tooth wore out in any presented column, the a single right under it could transfer upwards and go ahead and take previous tooth's location.
There were a great deal of gentle, aerated bones — usually related to theropods, like Tyrannosaurus rex, and the birds that evolved from them — Therefore the scientists assumed that was what they had been working with.
Even though Taquet at first explained the dinosaur’s continues to be while in the nineteen seventies, the formal classification and naming were being conducted many years later by Sereno, emphasizing the collaborative mother nature of its review and discovery.
The dental construction of Nigersaurus presents priceless insights into your dietary and ecological adaptations of sauropods. Its one of a kind dental arrangement and swift tooth alternative mechanism spotlight the assorted evolutionary techniques that dinosaurs used to thrive in their environments.
” Our 1st 7 days in the sector is amazing! Extraordinary discoveries appear to be expecting us all-around just about every dune. On our initial day, we identified bones from the lengthy-necked dinosaur Nigersaurus. Nigersaurus, you could possibly don't forget, we named for bones collected on the last expedition here 3 years back.
Nigersaurus was named after the West African state in which its fossils were being found out: the Republic of Niger. Throughout this creature’s time, the landscape (now part of the Sahara Desert) is considered to are actually coated with forests and braided rivers.
Nigersaurus is known from a number of partial skeletons and isolated bones, which have delivered beneficial details about its anatomy and conduct.
Nigersaurus is Just about the most archaeologically vital dinosaurs because it is helping scientists to raised understand the anatomy and physiology of other sauropods. Additionally it is The most wholly recognized rebbachisaurids, with in excess of two hundred bones of at least 17 diverse dinosaurs discovered.
Nigersaurus is best recognized for its distinctive cranium and jaw, which contained roughly five hundred slender teeth arranged in tightly packed rows. These teeth ended up specialized for grazing on small-lying vegetation, generating Nigersaurus a highly economical herbivore.
Though it experienced huge nostrils along with a fleshy snout, Sereno and colleagues uncovered that Nigersaurus had an underdeveloped olfactory area of its brain and therefore didn't have a sophisticated perception of smell. Its Mind-to-physique-mass ratio was regular for a reptile, and scaled-down than those of ornithischians and non-coelurosaurian theropods. The cerebrum comprised about 30% of your brain quantity, as in many other dinosaurs.[3] The American palaeoartist Mark Hallett and paleontologist Mathew J.
was named and described in more detail by Sereno and colleagues only in 1999, depending on stays of freshly uncovered people today. The same post also named
The journey to uncover the strategies with the Nigersaurus commenced with the initial fossil fragments identified within the nineteen seventies within the Elrhaz Formation of Niger, but it surely wasn’t right up until 1999 that a lot more total continues to be brought this fascinating dinosaur into the Highlight. These discoveries offered paleontologists with equally issues and prospects.
In 2017, the Argentinian palaeontologist Lucio M. Ibiricu and colleagues examined the postcranial skeletal pneumaticity while in the skeletons of rebbachisaurids, and advised that it had been an adaptation for lowering the density of the skeleton, and this might have reduced the 500 teeth dinosaur muscle energy required to move the human body, and also the warmth produced in the process.