Vegetation vacuum: An artist's impression of how Nigersaurus taqueti might have looked.

Credit: University of Chicago

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WASHINGTON DC: Palaeontologists have unveiled a 110-million-year-old African dinosaur with a mouth that powered through ground greenery like a vacuum, and almost translucent skull bones.

The fossilised sauropod, which was found in Niger, has been dubbed Nigersaurus taqueti.

Team leader Paul Sereno, of the University of Chicago, and National Geographic's 'explorer-in-residence', said that he named the creature N.taqueti in honour of French palaeontologist Philippe Taquet who shed light on this unusual animal in 1976 after the first fossils were found in the 1950s.

Weird anatomy

Didier Duthiel, a team member of Sereno, also of the University of Chicago, first spied the skull bones of the Nigersaurus in 1997. On that expedition and a subsequent one, teams collected almost 80 per cent of the total skeleton.

Stretching more than 13 metres, Nigersaurus was a younger and smaller cousin of the North American Diplodocus. Interestingly, it was able to sustain an elephant-sized body with what one could call an ultra-light head, said Sereno.

Indeed, the animal, which was hard pressed to lift its head above the height of its back, grazed in a way that might suggest a "Mesozoic cow" rather than a reptilian giraffe, he added.

Its vacuum-like mouth was studded with no fewer than 500 teeth, including sets of natural "replacement" teeth, to help it keep ploughing though its diet of horsetails and ferns.

"Among dinosaurs, the Nigersaurus sets the Guinness record for tooth replacement," Sereno quipped.
CT scanning made it possible for palaeontologists to view the inside of the animal's brain case. Tiny canals of the brain's balancing organ revealed the usual pose of the head: with the muzzle angled right down to the ground, allowing it to feed on plants near the ground.

"Mesozoic cow"

That is a stark difference from the forward-facing snouts of most dinosaurs, the scientists said.

Yet another curious anatomical feature of the Nigersaurus was its backbone, made of more air then bone, the scientists said.

"The vertebrae are so paper-thin, that it is difficult to imagine them coping with the stresses of everyday use – but we know that they did it, and they did it well," said Jeffrey Wilson, a co-author from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

"What we have here is the first good look at a sauropod brain, and it has important things to say about this animal's posture and behaviour," added team member Lawrence Witmer who imaged the creature's brain.

Sereno's work was funded by National Geographic. An exhibit of Nigersaurus, including its skull and skeleton, opened last week at the organisation's headquarters in Washington DC.

The dinosaur's anatomy and way of life are detained in December's issue of National Geographic magazine, as well as in the online journal PLoS ONE.