Nigersaurus was named after the West African nation where its fossils happen to be uncovered: The Republic of Niger. Back again when this animal roamed, forests and braided rivers lined the landscape. (Nigersaurus would've needed to watch out for Sarcosuchus, a massive relative of contemporary crocodiles.)
They consisted of vertically stacked columns of replaceable teeth. Each time the top tooth wore out in almost any provided column, the just one proper below it would move upwards and go ahead and take outdated tooth's spot.
Beyond its paleontological significance, Nigersaurus has received interest on line because of its identify. Some internet memes, specially the "Do not Google" pattern, have highlighted the dinosaur as "the a person with 500 teeth.
Though Taquet in the beginning explained the dinosaur’s remains during the seventies, the official classification and naming were executed many years later by Sereno, emphasizing the collaborative mother nature of its examine and discovery.
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Its unique dental composition suggests that it could possibly have had a unique feeding technique when compared with other sauropods, and its existence in Africa signifies that these kinds of dinosaurs had been extra widespread than Beforehand imagined.
As we’ve found, Nigersaurus had a wide muzzle and diverse teeth properly suited to consuming low-lying plants. This diet plan and Way of life might have demanded the creature to possess a steady supply of alternative teeth, because it might have worn out its tooth crowns swiftly. A study published while in the journal PLOS A single
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Nigersaurus is One of the more archaeologically critical dinosaurs mainly because it is helping scientists to better recognize the anatomy and physiology of other sauropods. It is also One of the more entirely regarded rebbachisaurids, with above two hundred bones of at the very least seventeen distinctive dinosaurs uncovered.
When the primary fossils of Nigersaurus have been identified in 1976, paleontologists couldn’t understand them as a new species. It is as the skeleton fossils have been quite hollow and distorted.
Although it experienced substantial nostrils as well as a fleshy snout, Sereno and colleagues 500 teeth dinosaur found that Nigersaurus experienced an underdeveloped olfactory location of its brain and thus did not have a complicated perception of smell. Its Mind-to-body-mass ratio was common for a reptile, and scaled-down than Those people of ornithischians and non-coelurosaurian theropods. The cerebrum comprised about 30% of your brain quantity, as in many other dinosaurs.[three] The American palaeoartist Mark Hallett and paleontologist Mathew J.
The snout was also proportionately shorter, as well as the tooth row was by no means prognathous, the snout suggestion not protruding relative to the remainder from the tooth series.[1] Nigersaurus was distinct in that its frontal bone (which formed A lot with the cranium-roof) was elongate (much narrower than extensive), and experienced a marked cerebral fossa (a despair over the area of the bone In the head).[four] The maxillary tooth row was in its entirety transversely rotated, its standard rear ninety° everted towards the front. This was matched by A similar rotation of your dentary of your lessen jaw. This transverse orientation with the higher and decreased tooth rows was exceptional into the dinosaur. Due to this configuration, no other tetrapod experienced all of its teeth Found as much for the front as Nigersaurus.[3][four]
The first fossils of Nigersaurus have been found out within the Elrhaz Development of Niger during the year 1997. Even so, further more analyze uncovered that Nigersaurus was in fact a member of another group of sauropods called the rebbachisaurids.
Limb substance as well as a scapula discovered close by have been also referred to precisely the same specimen. These fossils are housed on the National Museum of Niger.