Nigersaurus experienced a exceptional dental battery consisting of somewhere around five hundred slim, closely packed teeth, organized in rows alongside its vast, flat jaw.
Nigersaurus is a 30-foot-extensive plant-taking in dinosaur that lived 110 million several years back in what is currently Niger’s Sahara Desert. Nigersaurus lived inside of a lush setting alongside the predatory dinosaur Suchomimus, the plant eaters ouranosaurus and lurdusaurus, and supercroc. Nigersaurus had a fragile cranium and an incredibly vast mouth lined with teeth especially tailored for browsing plants near the ground.
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As compared, Nigersaurus was about the compact aspect. What caught Everybody's consideration was the dinosaur's mug.
On The idea of microtomography scans of skull elements with the holotype specimen, Sereno and colleagues made a "prototype" Nigersaurus skull they might examine. They also produced an endocast in the brain and scanned the semicircular canals of its interior ear, which they discovered for being oriented horizontally. In their 2007 analyze, they mentioned that the structure on the occiput at the back of the skull and cervical vertebrae would have limited the upward and downward movement of the neck and the rotation of the skull.
lived in what is now Niger about 115 to one hundred and five million years in the past, throughout the Aptian and Albian ages in the mid-Cretaceous. It likely lived in habitats dominated by inland floodplains (a riparian zone).
With the astonishing five hundred teeth, this dinosaur provides a unique glimpse into your evolutionary adaptations of prehistoric creatures. Allow’s take a look at the globe from the Nigersaurus and its intriguing dental anatomy.
Nigersaurus also bears signs of reduced-angle tooth-to-tooth use on The within from the maxillary crowns, which indicates that jaw motion was restricted to precise up-and-down motions. Worn teeth from the decrease jaw haven't nevertheless been discovered, but They're predicted to indicate opposing tooth-to-tooth put on. The chance to elevate their heads perfectly previously mentioned the bottom does not automatically signify they browsed on things there, as well as the short neck of Nigersaurus might have restricted the browsing assortment as compared to other diplodocoids.[3]
Paleontologist Paul Sereno explained Nigersaurus as “the weirdest dinosaur I’ve ever observed” once the dinosaur’s unusual options were to start with learned in 2007. The teeth ended up notably noteworthy given that they had been organized in dental batteries, which are generally present in beaked herbivores like Triceratops and Edmontosaurus, but are unusual amid sauropods.
Among the many myriad of dinosaurs that after roamed our World, Nigersaurus the Nigersaurus stands out, not for its sizing or ferocity, but for its remarkable dental framework.
Its feeding type continues to be in comparison to that of recent grazing animals or even a vacuum cleaner, since it probably swept its head side-to-aspect while consuming vegetation.
It had a brief neck for your sauropod, with thirteen cervical vertebrae. Almost all rebbachisaurids had rather quick necks along with a duration of 10 m (33 ft) or a lot less. The only member of your family that achieved the scale of greater sauropods was
Diplodocus skull for comparison Its cranium was very various from Diplodocus, suggesting a distinct feeding system. It experienced quite a few fenestrae (openings) and slim bones. It experienced a wide muzzle full of in excess of five hundred teeth.
cranium bones. Two expeditions afterwards, enough materials was identified to reconstruct 80% on the beast’s skeleton. In 1999, the invention of extra fossils gave paleontologists a primary glimpse on the dinosaur’s elaborate dental batteries and vacuum-like mouth.