Nigersaurus
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Fossil range: Early Cretaceous
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Sauropsida
Superorder: Dinosauria
Order: Saurischia
Suborder: Sauropodomorpha
Family: Rebbachisauridae
Genus: Nigersaurus
[Photo] A Nigersaurus taqueti attacked by a Sarcosuchus. Artwork by Todd Marshall. Nigersaurus taqueti and Sarcosuchus imperator
Nigersaurus (meaning "Niger lizard") is a genus of diplodocoid sauropod dinosaur from the middle Cretaceous period, about 119-99 million years ago that was described by Paul Sereno and colleagues in 1999. It is one of the most common genera found in the rich fossil vertebrate fauna of the Elrhaz Formation, Gadoufaoua, in the Niger Republic, discovered by Philippe Taquet, and described in a paper published in 1976. Like other sauropods from what used to be Gondwana, it had a shorter neck than Laurasian sauropods like Barosaurus. Despite these stockier proportions, Nigersaurus reached about 9 meters (29.5 feet) in length.
Nigersaurus lived during the Aptian or Albian age, and is remarkable for its complex tooth batteries. Previously, such tooth batteries have been known only in hadrosaur and ceratopsian dinosaurs, but the discovery of Nigersaurus showed that at least one sauropod lineage, the rebbachisaurids, had them as well.
At 9 meters in length, Nigersaurus was smaller than other members of the Rebbachisaur family, such as Rebbachisaurus itself, a large animal with a distinctive low spinal ridge on its back. Nigersaurus, although smaller, had a similar ridge, which in life would have consisted of skin and perhaps also flesh stretched across elongate neural spines in the vertebrae.
Although a common genus, Nigersaurus had been poorly known until 2005, because of the delicate and highly pneumatic (filled with air spaces) construction of the skull and skeleton, which means that the fossil remains have been disarticulated. Sereno and Jeffrey A. Wilson in 2005 provided the first description of the skull and feeding adaptations. Nigersaurus had as many as 600 teeth in its shovel-shaped head. Like the earlier diplodicids its head was oriented downwards and was best suited for low level browsing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigersaurus
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