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By Julia Bonelli
12:11, November 16th 2007 5 votes


The National Geographic Society will unveil a 110 million years old dinosaur that may have been the “cow of Mesozoic”, on Thursday. The unusual looking dinosaur had hundreds of very small teeth in the front of its jaws and fragile, almost translucent, air filled bones.

The up to ten rows of teeth and the shape of its jaws made his mouth work just like a vacuum cleaner. The Nigersaurus taqueti had been found in the Sahara desert by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno , who is a paleontologist and professor at the University of Chicago, and his team.

The dinosaur, who is a younger cousin of the North American Diplodocus, was first named in 1999, when Sereno found only a few of its bones. It is a herbivore, part of the sauropodes group, and it measures 30 feet in length, which is pretty small for a dinosaur in his group.

The elephant-sized dinosaur was almost not able to lift its head above its back, acting more like a cow than a long necked giraffe, eating greenery from the ground.

The special thing about Nigerosaurus is the 50 columns of teeth that formed a foot-long pair of scissors, with every cutting tooth having up to nine replacements in case they broke or fell, making it the dinosaur that holds the record for the most teeth.

The scientists have built a model of the dinosaur by using the most advanced techniques, such as computer modeling and X-rays, but also the old digging to build a model.

Sereno and his team used CT scanning in order to discover the equilibrium organ, which was made out of semicircular small canals in the braincase. This has shown that the muzzle of Nigersaurus angled directly toward the ground, unlike most dinosaurs that had forward pointing snouts.

The Nigersaurus taqueti is displayed at the National Geographic Museum at Explorers Hall, in an exhibit beginning on November 15.

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