How Did Nigersaurus Work?

Nigersaurus was a dinosaur with over 500 teeth that's been described as a Mesozoic cow with a face like a vacuum cleaner. Learn more about it in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/dinosaurs/nigersaurus.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren Bogelbaum. Here mesozoic cow sounds like a
joke cribbed from Gary Lawson's The Far Side, But it's not.
That nickname was given to the African dinosaur Nigrosaurus to
ka back when some new discoveries about its appearance were

(00:24):
made public in two thousand seven. Speaking to NPR at
the time, paleontologist Pulse Orino called Nigrosaurus the weirdest dinosaur
I've ever seen. He then compared its face to a
vacuum cleaner and unorthodox herb. Before this red pile grazed
and what's now the Sahara Desert some a hundred ten

(00:44):
million years ago. It gathered food with a big broad mouth.
The creatures snout was wider than the back of its head,
and Nitrosaurus had teeth to spare hundreds. In fact, a
Nitrosaurus was a little over twenty nine feet or around
nine meters long by the most liberal estimates, It weighed

(01:05):
roughly four and a half tons or four metric tons,
and so overall the dinosaur was about the size of
a modern African elephant. There's just one caveat you see.
Nitrosaurus was soro pod, one of the major dinosaurian groups.
The plant eating small headed sauropods hung around for about
a hundred and forty million years. Their ranks included the

(01:28):
largest animals to ever walk the earth. Experts say the
biggest species may have been over a hundred and ten
feet that's thirty three meters long, and meanwhile, forty eight
five foot or twelve to sixteen meter sauropods are common
throughout some parts of the fossil record. In comparison, Nitrosaurus
was on the small side, but what caught everyone's attention

(01:50):
was the dinosaurs. Mug Sereno's vacuum cleaner comparison is right
on the money. Viewed from above, Nitrosaurus's wide muzzle looks
like the the end of one of these household appliances.
But those jaws held something never before seen in a
sore pod. Dinosaur tooth or dental batteries. We're not talking

(02:12):
about double a duras l s here. Dental batteries were
efficient food processing tools used by many plant eating dinos.
They consisted of vertically stacked columns of replaceable teeth. Whenever
the top tooth wore out in any given column, the
one right below it would move upwards and take the
old tooth spot. And those tooth columns were packed right

(02:33):
alongside each other like canned sardines, so a dinosaur armed
with dental batteries could comfortably house several hundred teeth old
and new inside its mouth. In Nitrosaurus's case, the upper
jaws contained sixty columns of small needle shaped teeth, and
no fewer than sixty eight were present on the lower jaws.

(02:56):
Tallied together, the beast had more than five hundred individual teeth.
Dinosaur hunters are used to finding dental batteries and beaked
herbivores like the horned triceratops, but they're rare among the sauropods,
and too. The orientation is just as important as tooth quantity.
Ask anyone who's ever needed races me included all the

(03:19):
tooth columns in Nigrosaurus is dental batteries were lined up
at the very front of its mouth, a position along
the muzzles gently curved outer edge. So what's the dinosaur
to do with choppers like these? Nibbling on treetops probably
wasn't an option. Nigrosaurus wasn't just small bodied for a sauropod.
It also had a fairly short neck and no The

(03:41):
evidence suggests Nigrosaurus fed at ground level, sort of like
a cow. Nigrosaurus was named after the West African country
where its fossils have been found, the Republic of Niger.
Back when this animal reamed, forests and braided rivers covered
the landscape, that wide muzzle was perfect scooping up ferns, horsetails,

(04:02):
and other low lying plants, and with its bountiful teeth,
the dinosaur would have had no trouble shearing through this vegetation.
Eating like that can be rough on your dental health.
Nigrosaurus must have worn out its tooth crowns at a
rapid fire pace. Good thing it had a constant supply
of fresh teeth. According to a study published in the

(04:24):
journal Plos one, Nigrosaurus likely replaced each new tooth after
just fourteen days. Because Nitrosaurus ate with its head down,
experts have wondered about its posture. Sereno and his co
authors once argued that the herbivore aimed its face and
neck downwards whether it was feeding or not. As a
matter of habit. Through a painstaking process, this team was

(04:48):
able to reconstruct the inside of Nitrosaurus's skull, and that
gave them a good look at the lateral semicircular canal
or LSC of the inner ear, which helps animals keep
their balance. Judging by the l SC orientation in Nigersaurus,
Sereno and company hypothesized that the animal usually walked around

(05:08):
with its snamp pointed at the ground at a sixty
seven degree angle. A picture of moping teenager and you'll
get the idea. Other researchers have disputed this claim, though
studies released in two thousand nineteen found that the position
of the LSC can't reliably tell us what any given
sauropods normal head posture would have looked like. Nitrosaurus stayed

(05:31):
under the radar for quite a while. The first known
fossils belonging to this animal were recovered during the nineteen
fifties by French paleontologists in the Nigerian Sahara. Unfortunately, most
of these bones were isolated or fragmentary. Scientists working at
the time didn't even bother to give the sauropod a name.
Things got more interesting in that's when a member of

(05:54):
Sereno's field team noticed some Nigrosaurus skull bones. Over the
course of two expeditions, enough material was found to reconstruct
about eight percent of the beast's skeleton. And what a
skeleton it was. The newfound fossils gave us our first
look at the dino's complicated dental batteries and vacuum cleaner mouth.
Sereno named the species Nigrosaurus to k e as an

(06:17):
homage to paleontologist Philippe to kay In. Scientists probably would
have found more Nitrosaurus remains a whole lot sooner if
it hadn't been for the animal's fragile bone structure. A
to quote a two thousand seven Sereno led study, this
critter had a featherweight skull, several bones, and Nigrosaurus's head

(06:39):
were under zero point zero eight inches thick that's two millimeters,
and the oddities didn't stop there. Like today's birds, many
prehistoric dinosaurs had hollow bones containing air sacks. Nitrosaurus vertebra
took this to an extreme. Measured by volume, some of
its backbones actually contained more air than well bone wayfer

(07:03):
thin fossils aren't the easiest things to preserve and study.
Hats off to the researchers doing the work today's episode.
It's based on the article Nigrosaurus the Mesozoic cow with
more than five teeth on how stuff works dot Com.
Written by Mark Mancini. Brain Stuff is a production of

(07:24):
I Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works dot Com,
and it's produced by Tyler Clang. Four more podcasts from
my heart Radio visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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