Dinosaur of the Day: a ‘Flintstones lawnmower’ - November 16, 2007
Even measured against all the strange species the dinosaur world has thrown up, Nigersaurus taqueti is a bit of a freak. A paper published this week reveals the bizarrely shaped beast had equally bizarre feeding behaviour.
Its totally straight jaw kept 50 columns of teeth almost constantly near the ground where Nigersaurus acted as a prehistoric lawnmower. Scans of a fossil jaw bone also reveal nine replacement teeth stacked up to quickly step in if the front row are damaged. Other scans of balancing organs in the skull show that the head was habitually held angled straight towards the ground (press release, paper).
“We have seen nothing like this dinosaur. It’s a puzzle that says, ‘Figure this out,’ and we think it’s an extreme version of Diplodocus with the minimum amount of body structure it needed,” says Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago (NY Times).
“In modern mammals, when you see broad muzzles, you know that they are grazers, animals that eat grass, like cattle. When they have narrow, pointy snouts, you know they are browsers, animals that feed on leaves and bark they pull from trees and bushes, like giraffes. This thing was a Mesozoic cow.” (Chicago Tribune).
Nigersauruses was originally discovered, but not named, by French paleontologist Philippe Taquet in the 1950s. Later, Sereno’s team found skull bones in 1997 and eventually collected 80% of its strange body (the vertebrae are also odd). According to the Chicago Sun Times, the plant-eater probably fell prey to 40-foot-long Super Crocs and 10-ton Spinosaurs when they came to drink at rivers. There were, though, no grassy meadows in the Mesozoic so it probably grazed mainly on ferns.
“It usually takes some time for a big dinosaur skeleton to get cleaned and prepared, but in this case it also took some time to do serious head-scratching! The animal was so strange and difficult to interpret,” says Bora Zivkovic, who has some personal involvement with Nigersaurus, in his rather excellent blog post on the topic. Zivkovic is online community manager at PLoS-ONE, where the paper was published.
It’s a good thing the poor old beast isn’t around today to hear all the names it’s being called. So far these have included, ‘cow of the Mesozoic’, ‘vacuum-cleaner mouth’, the ‘30ft living lawnmower’ (times), ‘cowlike’, ‘bizarrely toothy’, and ‘prehistoric weed-eater’. Our favourite characterisation though is from the ever-reliable PZ Myers: “It’s so specialized it’s almost comical, and you can imagine something like this appearing on the Flintstones as a lawn mower or hedge trimmer.”
Image: art by Tyler Keillor and photo by Mike Hettwer / courtesy of Project Exploration, ©2007 National Geographic