That large muzzle with its Nigersaurus teeth was perfect for scooping up ferns, horsetails as well as other lower-lying plants. And Using the bountiful teeth, the dinosaur would've experienced no issues shearing via this vegetation.
We're closing in on that purpose rapidly mainly because we arrived upon a skeleton a few days later! This skeleton is lying on its aspect Along with the tail curved upward. The curve from the spine steps about 15 feet.
Nigersaurus was named and explained in more detail by Sereno and colleagues only in 1999, dependant on remains of freshly observed folks. Exactly the same short article also named Jobaria, One more sauropod from Niger. The genus name Nigersaurus ("Niger reptile") is usually a reference to your region where it absolutely was uncovered, and the specific identify taqueti honours Taquet, who was the very first to organise large-scale palaeontological expeditions to Niger.
Whilst Taquet at first explained the dinosaur’s stays within the nineteen seventies, the official classification and naming ended up done a long time later by Sereno, emphasizing the collaborative mother nature of its examine and discovery.
Nigersaurus is believed to behave very like other herbivore sauropods. They had likely invested most of their time in dangle-Doggy positions and grazing reduced-lying vegetation.
lived in what is currently Niger about 115 to a hundred and five million many years back, throughout the Aptian and Albian ages on the mid-Cretaceous. It most likely lived in habitats dominated by inland floodplains (a riparian zone).
Nigersaurus is considered to are a herbivore and might have fed on soft crops using its prolonged neck and a small head.
Wedel and mentioned in 2016 that though sauropods on the whole could use their extended necks to detect predators from afar, This is able to not utilize into the brief-necked Nigersaurus. They identified that the eyes of Nigersaurus have been placed further to the very best of the cranium than in most other sauropods, higher than the muzzle, which might give it overlapping fields of see. Its Visible industry would've been at or near to 360 degrees, and hypersensitivity of movement might have been imperative that you a vulnerable prey-animal.[twenty]
Nigersaurus's feeding strategy was unlike many other dinosaurs. Its broad, flat jaw was tailored for grazing close to the ground, earning it the nickname "Mesozoic Cow."
Its head is what truly stands out about Nigersaurus, though. The jaws, that have a flat entrance, are lined with about five hundred teeth, which Sereno says were being replaceable. These teeth were being all the exact same in dimension, and he estimates they likely only lasted about a month or so before they were being worn down.
The fragile mother nature on the Nigersaurus’s slender teeth and delicate skull produced excavation and preservation particularly complicated. Nonetheless, these troubles have been achieved with progressive strategies in fossil recovery and 3D reconstruction, allowing researchers to piece collectively the intricate particulars of its jaw and the astonishing assortment of five hundred teeth.
Taking in like that may be rough on your own dental wellbeing Except if you have a syteady source of substitute teeth. Nigersaurus should have worn out its tooth crowns in a quick-fire rate.
However the nasal bones usually are not entirely recognized, it seems the front margin with the bony nostril was closer on the snout than in other diplodocoids. The snout was also proportionately shorter, and also the tooth row was under no circumstances prognathous, the snout idea not protruding relative to the remainder of your tooth sequence. The maxillary tooth row was in its entirety transversely rotated, its regular rear ninety° everted towards the front. This was matched by An analogous rotation in the dentary of your reduce jaw. As a result, no other tetrapod had all of its teeth Positioned as much into the front as
The authors hence cautioned towards employing semicircular canals as proxy to infer the specific orientation of skulls. They uncovered that diet regime Nigersaurus correlated strongly with semicircular canal orientation, but not with head posture, though head posture and semicircular canal orientation ended up strongly correlated with phylogeny.[25]