Nigersaurus had a exceptional dental battery consisting of around 500 narrow, closely packed teeth, organized in rows alongside its broad, flat jaw.
Named once the country of Niger, exactly where its fossils had been initial located. The title was picked out to reflect its origins, however, the similarity in pronunciation to some racial slur has raised issues about cultural sensitivity and appropriate terminology.
A 2023 research because of the French palaeontologist Rémi Lefebvre and colleagues examined the microanatomical structure of the limb bones of Nigersaurus by CT-scans, the initial these types of review of the sauropod. Digital sections of the limb bones sampled from folks of different measurements were explored to find out the selection of variation. Weighty-excess weight bearing animals generally have attributes affiliated with this situation, impacting the inner construction of your limb bones, however the variation involving this kind of bones is inadequately known.
The Nigersaurus roamed the lush landscapes of the middle Cretaceous time period, in what is currently the Sahara Desert of Niger. This spot, once teeming with daily life, furnished a loaded tapestry of sentimental, leafy vegetation which was ideal for the Nigersaurus’s specialised diet program.
e. Apatosaurus. They also had predators that lived in a similar area and 1 of their predators was theropoda.
Sauropod dinosaurs, like Nigersaurus, walked on four legs, with a very long “whiplash tail” and an extended neck. But compared to other sauropods, it absolutely was comparatively small — sitting down somewhere concerning an African and Indian elephant in dimension.
The enamel around the teeth of Nigersaurus was hugely asymmetrical, ten occasions thicker on the outwards going through side than within the interior side.
We are interested find much more than simply dinosaurs. We want to find all animals and vegetation that once lived along The traditional streams and forests 110 million decades in the past. One of the most frequent fossils we encountered in the first 7 days of work belonged to an unlimited crocodile known as Sarcosuchus.
It had a broad muzzle crammed with more than 500 teeth, which had been replaced in a speedy price: all-around every single 14 times. The jaws could have borne a keratinous sheath. Unlike other tetrapods, the tooth-bearing bones of its jaws were being rotated transversely relative to the rest 500 teeth dinosaur of the cranium, so that each one of its teeth were being Positioned far to your front.
And what a skeleton it absolutely was! The newfound fossils gave us our initially think about the dino's intricate dental batteries and vacuum cleaner mouth. Sereno named the species Nigersaurus taqueti — as an homage to French paleontologist Philippe Taquet — in 1999.
Teeth at distinctive progress stages, Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia The slender teeth experienced marginally curved tooth crowns, which ended up oval in cross-segment. The crowns were being unique in owning distinguished ridges over the margins in their midline and sides. The teeth inside the lower jaw may possibly happen to be 20–thirty% lesser than Individuals from the upper jaw, but several are identified, and they are of unsure maturity. Other than this, the teeth were being equivalent.[4] Less than Every single Energetic tooth there was a column of 9 substitute teeth in the jaw.
Feeding on like that can be tough on your own dental health and fitness Unless of course there is a syteady provide of substitute teeth. Nigersaurus will need to have worn out its tooth crowns at a speedy-fire speed.
The dinosaur's vertebrae was stuffed with air pockets similar to Those people of birds, Therefore the dinosaur was most likely pretty mild, too. Its brain was with regards to the dimensions of a walnut, that's roughly typical for sauropods, Sereno suggests.
The authors therefore cautioned in opposition to applying semicircular canals as proxy to infer the precise orientation of skulls. They identified that diet regime correlated strongly with semicircular canal orientation, but not with head posture, even though head posture and semicircular canal orientation ended up strongly correlated with phylogeny.[twenty five]