Nigersaurus is positioned while in the group of sauropods by which each of the prolonged-necked and very long-tailed dinosaurs are put. Nigersaurus was probably one of the smallest sauropods due to the fact its neck was quick. An Grownup Nigersaurus weighed all around four tons and its dimensions was akin to a modern Elephant.
Through a painstaking approach, this workforce was able to reconstruct the inside of Nigersaurus' skull. That gave them a very good consider the lateral semicircular canal (LSC) in the interior ear, which aids animals maintain their stability.
Original discoveries of Nigersaurus fossils date back again towards the 1960s, but it surely wasn't right until the seventies that more comprehensive remains ended up uncovered. These continues to be were being formally researched and explained by paleontologist Paul Sereno and his workforce in 1999.
Considering the fact that many rebbachisaurids inhabited latitudes that may are tropical to subtropical in the center Cretaceous, this pneumaticity could have aided the animals cope While using the very higher temperatures. In line with Ibiricu and colleagues, this adaptation may be a reason why rebbachisaurids have been the sole team of diplodocoids that survived into the Late Cretaceous.[21]
Which means as just one tooth wore down or broke off, A different was wanting to choose its place. This swift tooth substitution cycle, happening around each 14 times, ensured that Nigersaurus always had functional teeth to process its meals.
In 2020, the French palaeontologist Julien Benoit and colleagues examined lateral semicircular canal correlation to head posture on modern-day mammals, and found that when there was important correlation in between the reconstructed and precise head postures, the aircraft of the semicircular canal wasn't held horizontally in the resting pose as inferred.
According to this biomechanical Examination, the team concluded that the head and muzzle had been habitually oriented sixty seven° downwards and shut to ground level, as an adaptation for ground-amount searching. That is as opposed to the way in which other sauropods are restored, with their heads held more horizontally.[3]
lived in what is now Niger about one hundred fifteen to one zero five million years ago, in the Aptian and Albian ages of your mid-Cretaceous. It probable lived in habitats dominated by inland floodplains (a riparian zone).
Nigersaurus had a jaw construction as opposed to some other dinosaur. Its wide, squared-off muzzle housed about 500 slender, pencil-like teeth. These teeth weren't evenly distributed but have been arranged in columns and rows, with as lots of as nine substitute teeth driving Just about every Lively tooth.
The reconstructed skeleton of an extremely Unusual dinosaur, the plant-consuming Nigersaurus. It is a sculptural rendition of what the experts expect the dinosaur's unique head could possibly have looked like.
The Nigersaurus is an interesting and one of a what dinosaur has 500 teeth kind dinosaur that has captured prevalent interest, partly on account of its unconventional features and intriguing nickname as being the "dinosaur with 500 teeth."
The Nigersaurus, with its staggering five hundred teeth, presents a fascinating contrast to its dinosaur relatives, Specifically other sauropods. As opposed to its cousins with less, thicker teeth, the Nigersaurus’s slender, pencil-like teeth were uniquely tailored for snipping comfortable vegetation, a stark variation from your sturdy teeth of sauropods like Brachiosaurus, which had been very likely made to manage tougher crops.
The vast muzzle of Nigersaurus was very likely an adaptation to its minimal-lying herbivorous diet plan, letting it to simply scoop up and Get plant content from the ground.
The sauropod's jaw appears Just about like a significant nail clipper, with large rows of countless teeth on its upper and reduce jaws. It Pretty much didn’t seem to in good shape into its skull when Sereno was endeavoring to piece it alongside one another.