Nigersaurus was named after the West African nation in which its fossils have already been located: The Republic of Niger. Back again when this animal roamed, forests and braided rivers coated the landscape. (Nigersaurus would've had to watch out for Sarcosuchus, a huge relative of modern crocodiles.)
are grouped inside the subfamily Nigersaurinae of your household Rebbachisauridae, and that is part of the sauropod superfamily Diplodocoidea. Nigersaurus
The stays of Nigersaurus ended up at first explained by Taquet in 1976 as belonging to your dicraeosaurid, but in 1999 Sereno and colleagues reclassified it for a rebbachisaurid diplodocoid.[4] These researchers speculated that considering that short necks and little measurement was recognized amongst basal diplodocoids, it could reveal these ended up ancestral capabilities of your team.
Nigersaurus is a crucial discovery for paleontologists since it really helps to get rid of mild within the evolution and diversity of sauropods in the mid-Cretaceous period.
e. Apatosaurus. Additionally they had predators that lived in exactly the same location and a single in their predators was theropoda.
If true, it might starkly distinction with most sauropod reconstructions, exhibiting the animal holding its head horizontally.
Having said that, this claim has actually been contested by other scientists who believe that Nigersaurus was possibly more standard of other sauropods.
Its skull was very specialised for feeding. It had four large facet fenestrae, openings while in the skull and skinny bones. It had a wide muzzle stuffed with a lot more than 500 teeth, which were changed all-around just about every 14 days. The jaws can have experienced a keratinous sheath, a thing similar to a wide beak. Nigersaurus is the one regarded tetrapod animal to obtain experienced jaws wider compared to skull and teeth that extended laterally across the front.
Existence restoration Nigersaurus was unique in that its dorsal (back) vertebrae experienced paired pneumatic Areas at the base in the neural spines (the spines that projected upwards in the vertebrae). The presacral vertebrae (vertebrae in front of the sacrum) were closely pneumatised to The purpose wherever the column consisted of the number of hollow "shells", Just about every divided by a skinny septum in the center. It experienced very little to no cancellous bone, building the centra skinny bone plates full of air spaces. The vertebral arches had been so closely pierced by extensions with the exterior air sacs that of their facet partitions very little remained but 2 mm (0.
When the first fossils of Nigersaurus were found out in 1976, paleontologists couldn’t realize them as a whole new species. It truly is because the skeleton fossils were being quite hollow and distorted.
A 2023 review via the French palaeontologist Rémi Lefebvre and colleagues examined the microanatomical construction with the limb bones of Nigersaurus via CT-scans, the primary these kinds of examine of a sauropod. Virtual sections on the limb bones sampled from people today 500 teeth dinosaur of different measurements were being explored to determine the array of variation. Significant-bodyweight bearing animals normally have functions affiliated with this affliction, influencing the inner construction from the limb bones, though the variation in between such bones is inadequately regarded.
In 2020, the French palaeontologist Julien Benoit and colleagues examined lateral semicircular canal correlation to move posture on modern-day mammals, and located that although there was important correlation among the reconstructed and real head postures, the plane of your semicircular canal wasn't held horizontally within the resting pose as inferred.
‘ amusing-on the lookout cranium, battery of teeth, and modest dimensions for just a sauropod have unquestionably gained it a spot within the annals of dinosaur oddities.
The Nigersaurus, with its staggering 500 teeth, provides a fascinating contrast to its dinosaur family members, Primarily other sauropods. Unlike its cousins with fewer, thicker teeth, the Nigersaurus’s slender, pencil-like teeth ended up uniquely adapted for snipping tender vegetation, a stark variation with the strong teeth of sauropods like Brachiosaurus, which have been possible designed to handle harder plants.