A new branch has been found on the dinosaur family tree, dating back 110 million years. It’s a plant eater known as Nigersaurus taqueti, described by its finders as having “a mouth that worked like a vacuum cleaner, hundreds of tiny teeth and nearly translucent skull bones.”

Found in the Sahara by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno, paleontologist and professor at the University of Chicago, the dinosaur was originally named by Sereno and his team in 1999 with only a few of its distinctive bones in hand. Since then, Nigersaurus has emerged as an anatomically bizarre dinosaur.

Nigersaurus would have spent most of the time browsing plants close to the ground.

Credit: Illustration © Todd Marshall, courtesy Project Exploration

This younger cousin of the more familiar North American dinosaur Diplodocus, is small for a sauropod, measuring only 30 feet in length. It managed to sustain its elephant-sized body with a featherweight skull armed with hundreds of needle-shaped teeth, said Sereno. Barely able to lift its head above its back, Nigersaurus operated more like a Mesozoic cow than a reptilian giraffe, mowing down mouthfuls of greenery that consisted largely of ferns and horsetails.

The dinosaur’s oddest feature was a broad, straight-edged muzzle, which allowed its mouth to work close to the ground. Unlike any other plant eater, Nigersaurus had more than 50 columns of teeth, all lined up tightly along the front edge of its squared-off jaw, forming, in effect, a foot-long pair of scissors.

A CT scan of the jaw bones showed up to nine “replacements” stacked behind each cutting tooth, so that when one wore out, another immediately took its place. There were more than 500 teeth in total, with a new tooth in each column joining the scissors edge every month. “Among dinosaurs,” Sereno said, “Nigersaurus sets the Guinness record for tooth replacement.”

Jaw design was not Nigersaurus’ only odd characteristic: It had a backbone that was more air than bone. The first bones of Nigersaurus were picked up in the 1950s by French paleontologists, though the species was not named. Sereno and his team honored this early work by naming the species after French paleontologist Philippe Taquet. Sereno’s team member Didier Dutheil first spotted the skull bones of Nigersaurus in 1997, and on that expedition and the next, teams collected about 80 percent of the skeleton.

The fossil area, in the present-day nation of Niger, was home to the enormous extinct crocodilian nicknamed SuperCroc as well as the likely fish eater Suchomimus, both found by Sereno and both on the prowl for Nigersaurus some 110 million years ago. Then, the African continent was just beginning to free itself of land connections it inherited as a central part of the ancient supercontinent Pangaea. Nigersaurus’ closest relative has been found recently in Spain.

Caption: Nigersaurus would have spent most of the time browsing plants close to the ground.

Credit: Illustration © Todd Marshall, courtesy Project Exploration