A 2009 examine by the British palaeontologist Mike P. Taylor and colleagues agreed that Nigersaurus was capable to feed with the downturned head and neck posture proposed from the 2007 review, but contested that this was the habitual posture with the animal. The analyze pointed out that the "neutral" head and neck posture of contemporary animals would not necessarily correspond to their habitual head posture.
Nigersaurus is actually a thirty-foot-very long plant-ingesting dinosaur that lived a hundred and ten million many years back in what is now Niger’s Sahara Desert. Nigersaurus lived inside of a lush surroundings together with the predatory dinosaur Suchomimus, the plant eaters ouranosaurus and lurdusaurus, and supercroc. Nigersaurus had a fragile skull and an extremely vast mouth lined with teeth especially tailored for searching vegetation near to the ground.
Constant Tooth Substitution: Teeth were being replaced just about every fourteen times, making certain a pointy, practical dental battery to cope with frequent don from grazing.
In normally colourful trend, Sereno explained Nigersaurus to be a cross in between Darth Vader as well as a vacuum cleaner and also known as it a "Mesozoic cow" (not an inaccurate description, should you dismiss the fact that a full-grown Nigersaurus measured thirty toes from head to tail and weighed up to five tons!)
Nigersaurus is thought to behave very similar to other herbivore sauropods. They had probably used most of their time in hang-Doggy positions and grazing very low-lying vegetation.
” Our initial week in the sphere has actually been impressive! Extraordinary discoveries appear to be watching for us close to each and every dune. On our initial day, we uncovered bones of your prolonged-necked dinosaur Nigersaurus. Nigersaurus, you could remember, we named for bones collected on the last expedition in this article 3 a long time ago.
Because of this as one tooth wore down or broke off, A further was all set to acquire its place. This swift tooth substitution cycle, developing around each fourteen times, ensured that Nigersaurus generally experienced practical teeth to method its foodstuff.
On The idea of microtomography scans of skull things of the holotype specimen, Sereno and colleagues developed a "prototype" Nigersaurus cranium they may examine. They also manufactured an endocast of the brain and scanned the semicircular canals of its internal ear, which they observed to generally be oriented horizontally. In their 2007 study, they said the composition of the occiput at the back of the skull and cervical vertebrae would have minimal the upward and downward motion of your neck as well as the rotation with the cranium.
Head's Up! (Maybe) For the reason that Nigersaurus ate with its head down, authorities have questioned about its posture. Sereno and his co-authors the moment argued which the herbivore aimed its face and neck downwards — no matter whether it had been feeding or not — as being a matter of practice.
One for the most distinctive characteristics in the Nigersaurus was its teeth. It's got five hundred teeth! They were being peg-like and adapted for grazing on vegetation.
Teeth at distinctive advancement phases, Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia The slender teeth had a bit curved tooth crowns, which have been oval in cross-segment. The crowns have been distinct in possessing prominent ridges over the margins in their midline and sides. The teeth during the decreased jaw could have been twenty–30% more compact than All those inside the higher jaw, but couple of are regarded, and they are of unsure maturity. Apart from this, the teeth ended up identical.[four] Under Every Lively tooth there was a column what dinosaur has 500 teeth of nine alternative teeth inside the jaw.
In 2020, the French palaeontologist Julien Benoit and colleagues analyzed lateral semicircular canal correlation to move posture on present day mammals, and found that whilst there was sizeable correlation involving the reconstructed and true head postures, the plane of the semicircular canal wasn't held horizontally from the resting pose as inferred.
Nigersaurus didn't show the same modifications found while in the jaws of other dinosaurs with dental batteries, or mammals with elaborate chewing features. The lower jaw was L-shaped and divided into the subcylindrical transverse ramus, which contained the teeth, as well as back again ramus, which was additional light-weight and was The placement for a lot of the muscle attachments. It absolutely was distinct in that the tooth row expanded to the edges from your plane of the most crucial ramus on the reduced jaw.
The Nigersaurus, with its staggering five hundred teeth, presents a fascinating distinction to its dinosaur kin, Particularly other sauropods. Not like its cousins with much less, thicker teeth, the Nigersaurus’s slender, pencil-like teeth have been uniquely tailored for snipping delicate vegetation, a stark distinction through the strong teeth of sauropods like Brachiosaurus, which had been likely designed to tackle tougher vegetation.