Nigersaurus
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 Nigersaurus taqueti being attacked by a Sarcosuchus imperator.
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Extinct (fossil)
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| Nigersaurus taqueti Sereno et al., 1999 |
Nigersaurus ("Niger lizard") is a relatively small sauropod (15 meters long) that was recently described, and lived in the middle Cretaceous period. It is one of the most common species found in the rich fossil vertebrate fauna of the Elrhaz Formation, Gadoufaoua, in the Niger Republic, discovered by Philippe Taquet, and described in a paper published in 1976.
Nigersaurus lived during the Aptian or Albian age, and is remarkable for its complex tooth batteries. Previously, such tooth batteries have been known only in hadrosaur and ceratopsian dinosaurs, but it now seems that at least one sauropod lineage, the Rebbachisaurs, had them as well.
At “only” 15 meters in length, Nigersaurus was smaller than other members of the Rebbachisaur family, such as Rebbachisaurus itself, a large animal with a distinctive low "fin" on its back. Nigersaurus, although smaller, had a similar fin, which in life would have consisted of skin and perhaps also flesh stretched across elongate neural spines in the vertebrae.
Although a common species, Nigersaurus has been poorly known until now, because of the delicate and highly pneumatic (filled with air spaces) construction of the skull and skeleton, which means that the fossil remains have been disarticulated. Paul C. Sereno and Jeffrey A. Wilson in 2005 provided the first description of the skull and feeding adaptations. Nigersaurus had as many as 600 teeth in its shovel-shaped head.
[edit] References
- Sereno, P.C., Beck, A.L., Dutheil, D.B., Larsson, H.C.E., Lyon, G.H., Moussa, B., Sadleir, R.W., Sidor, C.A., Varricchio, D.J., Wilson, G.P, and Wilson, J.A., (1999), Cretaceous Sauropods from the Sahara and the Uneven Rate of Skeletal Evolution Among Dinosaurs, Science 286(5443): 1342-1347 (Nov 12 1999)
- Taquet, P. 1976. Géologie et paléontologie du gisement de Gadoufaoua. (Aptien du Niger). Cahiers de paléontologie, Paris, 191 pp
- Wilson, J. A. and Sereno, P. C. (2005) "Structure and Evolution of a Sauropod Tooth Battery" in The Sauropods: Evolution and Paleobiology in Curry Rogers and Wilson, eds, 2005, The Sauropods: Evolution and Paleobiology, University of California Press, Berkeley, ISBN 0-520-24623-3
