Even the skies had been occupied – lengthy-winged flying pterosaurs swooped overhead, from time to time diving down to grab a tasty fish out of the river.
The nickname "dinosaur with five hundred teeth" originates from Nigersaurus's unique dental battery. Its jaw held close to five hundred slender teeth, arranged in tightly packed rows, and these teeth were continuously changed in the course of its life.
Nigersaurus had in excess of five hundred teeth arranged in dental batteries (rows of teeth stacked upon other rows of teeth), which permitted it to successfully graze on reduced-lying vegetation like ferns and horsetails. Worn teeth ended up regularly replaced to keep up Niversaurus' productive feeding.
The remains of Nigersaurus were at first explained by Taquet in 1976 as belonging to your dicraeosaurid, but in 1999 Sereno and colleagues reclassified it like a rebbachisaurid diplodocoid.[4] These scientists speculated that considering the fact that limited necks and smaller dimensions was recognised among the basal diplodocoids, it could show these have been ancestral capabilities on the team.
There's been discussion on irrespective of whether its head was habitually held downwards, or horizontally like other sauropods. It lived in a very riparian habitat, and its diet program almost certainly consisted of soft crops, for example ferns, horsetails, and angiosperms. It's One of the more popular fossil vertebrates observed in the area, and shared its habitat with other dinosaurian megaherbivores, as well as significant theropods and crocodylomorphs.
In 1997, when paleontologist Paul Sereno initially began to unearth the stays of the dinosaur in Niger's Sahara Desert, he didn’t know what to Imagine. He was excavating bones inside a dry area identified as Gadoufaoua, which had a loaded fossil mattress very first discovered by French uranium miners.
By having an astonishing five hundred teeth, this dinosaur offers a singular glimpse to the evolutionary adaptations of prehistoric creatures. Let’s investigate the planet of your Nigersaurus and its fascinating dental anatomy.
Nigersaurus (/niːˈʒɛərsɔːrəs, ˈnaɪdʒərsɔːrəs/) is really a genus of rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur that lived all through the middle Cretaceous interval, about one hundred fifteen to 105 million many years back. It absolutely was found from the Elrhaz Formation in a location named Gadoufaoua, in Niger.
It had a broad muzzle stuffed with much more than 500 teeth, which ended up replaced in a quick level: about each and every 14 days. The jaws may have borne a keratinous sheath. Unlike other tetrapods, the tooth-bearing bones of its jaws were being rotated transversely relative to the rest of the skull, so that every one of its teeth ended up Positioned considerably to your front.
The jaws can have borne a keratinous sheath. Compared with other tetrapods, the tooth-bearing bones of its jaws were rotated transversely relative to the remainder of the skull, so that all of its teeth were being Positioned significantly on the entrance. Its skeleton was hugely pneumatised (crammed with air Areas connected to air sacs), though the limbs were being robustly created.
The extensive muzzle of Nigersaurus was probably an adaptation to its low-lying herbivorous eating plan, making it possible for it to easily scoop up and Acquire plant content from the bottom.
Although other weighty animals examined (which include rhinoceroses) had thick and variable bone cortices, the cortex of Nigersaurus was fairly thin. These researchers proposed which the microanatomy of sauropods wasn't affected by drastic selective stress due to bearing body weight, but that characteristics including the columnar limbs (as noticed in elephants), pneumaticity, and fleshy foot pads and cartilage comfortable strain within the bones. Additionally they prompt that sauropods may consequently are already lighter in body weight than expected for their sizing, supporting the bottom body mass estimates for these dinosaurs.[22]
Dental batteries are a novel adaptation present in some plant-ingesting dinosaurs that allowed them to successfully approach hard vegetation. These batteries consist of vertically stacked columns of Nigersaurus teeth, with the best tooth in Each and every column becoming changed since it wears out.
The authors as a result cautioned against using semicircular canals as proxy to infer the exact orientation of skulls. They uncovered that diet plan correlated strongly with semicircular canal orientation, although not with head posture, though head posture and semicircular canal orientation had been strongly correlated with phylogeny.[25]