Paleontologists Thursday unveiled a 110 million-year-old African sauropod dinosaur with a weird anatomy including a mouth that powered through ground greenery like a vacuum, and almost translucent skull bones.
The fossilized dinosaur, which was found Niger, has been dubbed Nigersaurus Taqueti.
Paul Sereno, who led the effort explained at National Geographic headquarters here, gave the creature the Taqueti name in honor of French paleontologist Philippe Taquet who first brought to light this unusual animal in 1976 after the first fossils were found in the 1950s.
Didier Duthiel, a team member of Sereno, of the University of Chicago, first spied the skull bones of the Nigersaurus in 1997. On that expedition and a subsequent one, teams rounded up almost 80 percent of the total skeleton.
Stretching about 13 meters (30 feet), the 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 untra-light head, said Sereno. Indeed, the animal, which was hard pressed to lift its head above 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 plowing though its diet of horsetails and ferns.
"Among dinosaurs, the Nigersaurus sets the Guinness record for tooth replacement," Sereno joked.
CT scanning made it possible for paleontologists 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 muzzling angled right down to the ground, allowing it to feed on plants near the ground.
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 coauthor from the University of Michigan.
Sereno's work was funded by National Geographic. An exhibit on the Nigersaurus, including its skull and skeleton, opens November 15 at the organization's headquarters.
The dinosaur's anatomy and way of life are detained in December's issue of National Geographic magazine, as well as in PLoS ONE, the online journal from the Public Library of Science.
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