That huge muzzle with its Nigersaurus teeth was perfect for scooping up ferns, horsetails and also other lower-lying plants. And Using the bountiful teeth, the dinosaur would've had no trouble shearing by this vegetation.
Whilst going for walks throughout an exceptionally flat place, Gabe designed a outstanding discover—the bones of a brand new meat-eating dinosaur lay partly uncovered at her toes. She brushed absent the sand through the higher jaw.
Further than its paleontological importance, Nigersaurus has attained interest on line as a result of its name. Some Net memes, notably the "You should not Google" development, have highlighted the dinosaur as "the a single with 500 teeth.
The stays of Nigersaurus ended up originally described by Taquet in 1976 as belonging to a dicraeosaurid, but in 1999 Sereno and colleagues reclassified it to be a rebbachisaurid diplodocoid.[four] These scientists speculated that considering that short necks and compact size was acknowledged between basal diplodocoids, it may suggest these were being ancestral options of the team.
The Nigersaurus is a captivating and distinctive dinosaur which has captured popular interest, partly due to its abnormal capabilities and intriguing nickname as being the "dinosaur with 500 teeth."
Sauropod dinosaurs, like Nigersaurus, walked on four legs, which has a very long “whiplash tail” and an extended neck. But in comparison to other sauropods, it absolutely was relatively small — sitting down somewhere between an African and Indian elephant in dimension.
in 1999, after additional and more total stays had been located and explained. The genus name signifies "Niger reptile", and the specific title honours the French palaeontologist Philippe Taquet, who uncovered the very first stays.
Nigersaurus is known from many partial skeletons and isolated bones, which have presented precious details about its anatomy and habits.
A 2009 study via the British palaeontologist Mike P. Taylor and colleagues agreed that Nigersaurus was in the position to feed With all the downturned head and neck posture proposed from the what dinosaur has 500 teeth 2007 analyze, but contested this was the habitual posture of your animal. The examine mentioned the "neutral" head and neck posture of contemporary animals will not always correspond to their habitual head posture.
A person for essentially the most exclusive characteristics of your Nigersaurus was its teeth. It has 500 teeth! They ended up peg-like and tailored for grazing on plants.
Its feeding type continues to be compared to that of contemporary grazing animals or perhaps a vacuum cleaner, because it possible swept its head aspect-to-facet whilst consuming vegetation.
Even though other major animals examined (like rhinoceroses) had thick and variable bone cortices, the cortex of Nigersaurus was instead slender. These scientists recommended the microanatomy of sauropods wasn't impacted by drastic selective force caused by bearing excess weight, but that functions like the columnar limbs (as found in elephants), pneumaticity, and fleshy foot pads and cartilage relaxed pressure within the bones. Additionally they proposed that sauropods may well hence happen to be lighter in fat than predicted for their measurement, supporting the lowest overall body mass estimates for these dinosaurs.[22]
Nigersaurus did not exhibit the same modifications found from the jaws of other dinosaurs with dental batteries, or mammals with elaborate chewing functions. The decreased jaw was L-formed and divided in to the subcylindrical transverse ramus, which contained the teeth, and also the again ramus, which was additional lightweight and was the location for most of the muscle mass attachments. It was distinctive in the tooth row expanded to the edges with the plane of the main ramus with the reduced jaw.
Nigersaurus was named and described in additional element by Sereno and colleagues only in 1999, based on continues to be of newly discovered folks. The same short article also named Jobaria, Yet another sauropod from Niger. The genus identify Nigersaurus ("Niger reptile") is a reference on the place the place it was discovered, and the specific name taqueti honours Taquet, who was the 1st to organise huge-scale palaeontological expeditions to Niger.