Nigersaurus was named once the West African nation in which its fossils are already located: The Republic of Niger. Back again when this animal roamed, forests and braided rivers coated the landscape. (Nigersaurus would've needed to Be careful for Sarcosuchus, a big relative of contemporary crocodiles.)
Given that quite a few rebbachisaurids inhabited latitudes that will happen to be tropical to subtropical in the center Cretaceous, this pneumaticity could possibly have aided the animals cope While using the really significant temperatures. In line with Ibiricu and colleagues, this adaptation could be a explanation why rebbachisaurids were being the one team of diplodocoids that survived in to the Late Cretaceous.[21]
Even with its scaled-down dimensions, Nigersaurus is notable for its exclusive adaptations, significantly its specialised teeth and feeding mechanisms, which distinguish it in paleontological experiments.
In commonly vibrant vogue, Sereno described Nigersaurus being a cross among Darth Vader plus a vacuum cleaner and also referred to as it a "Mesozoic cow" (not an inaccurate description, in case you dismiss The truth that a complete-grown Nigersaurus measured 30 ft from head to tail and weighed up to five tons!)
In Nigersaurus' scenario, the upper jaws contained 60 columns of small, needle-shaped upper teeth. And no less than sixty eight quite sharp teeth ended up current over the decreased jaws. Tallied jointly, higher jaw and decrease jaw, the beast had greater than five hundred individual teeth.
lived in what is currently Niger about 115 to 105 million decades ago, over the Aptian and Albian ages in the mid-Cretaceous. It likely lived in habitats dominated by inland floodplains (a riparian zone).
in 1999, immediately after further more and even more entire stays ended up uncovered and described. The genus identify usually means "Niger reptile", and the precise name honours the French palaeontologist Philippe Taquet, who learned the first continues to be.
On The premise of microtomography scans of skull aspects of your holotype specimen, Sereno and colleagues established a "prototype" Nigersaurus skull they might study. They also manufactured an endocast of your brain and scanned the semicircular canals of its internal ear, which they located to become oriented horizontally. Inside their 2007 study, what dinosaur has 500 teeth they said which the composition in the occiput in the back of the skull and cervical vertebrae would have confined the upward and downward motion of your neck and also the rotation on the cranium.
A 2009 examine via the British palaeontologist Mike P. Taylor and colleagues agreed that Nigersaurus was in the position to feed Along with the downturned head and neck posture proposed from the 2007 study, but contested that this was the habitual posture of your animal. The review famous the "neutral" head and neck posture of recent animals won't automatically correspond to their habitual head posture.
A single for quite possibly the most distinctive functions with the Nigersaurus was its teeth. It's five hundred teeth! They had been peg-like and adapted for grazing on crops.
The broad muzzle of Nigersaurus was possible an adaptation to its minimal-lying herbivorous eating plan, making it possible for it to easily scoop up and Acquire plant substance from the ground.
The dental structures of Nigersaurus also counsel they ate tender plants in massive quantities to meet their nutritional necessities. They mostly ate angiosperms, horsetails, and ferns as foods. Lots of paleontologists also believe that their five hundred intently packed teeth arrangement also functioned similar to a comb. This comb-like teeth arrangement may have also aided them in filtering and having aquatic plants.
Matters received extra fascinating in 1997. That is each time a member of Sereno's discipline crew observed some Nigersaurus cranium bones. In excess of the class of two expeditions, sufficient content was discovered to reconstruct about 80 per cent of your beast's skeleton.
Making use of proof from CT scans and 3D/Laptop or computer modeling, researchers have established the sauropod probable habitually held its head downwards, towards the bottom — Even though That is hotly debated.