Photo © M. Hettwer
The skeleton of Nigersaurus was discovered
in the Sahara in 1997 by a team led by Dr. Paul Sereno.
This bizarre-looking, long-necked plant-eating dinosaur
is named Nigersaurus taqueti in honor of the
country in which it was found (Niger) and a French paleontologist,
Dr. Philippe Taquet, who led the first fossil expeditions to Niger in the 1960s.
When dinosaurs walked the Earth, the ancient supercontinent
Pangaea broke apart into the continents we know today. Isolated
by oceans, each continent soon gave rise to its own
unique species. Nigersaurus lived 110 million
years ago when Africa was and South America were nearly separated by seaways that would become the Atlantic Ocean. |
Illustration © T.
Marshall
Striking a memorable portrait, Nigersaurus was the supreme dinosaurian fern-mower, using its broad muzzle to crop soft plants near the ground. |
The extremely fragile bones of Nigersaurus compose
a skull and skeleton with a length of 9 meters (30 feet).
Illustration P. Sereno and C. Abraczinskas
Skeletal silhouette of Nigersaurus showing the bones discovered to date.
Its jaw bones were packed with more than 500 tiny teeth. As teeth wore down, they were replaced by a new ones! With its squared
muzzle and crane-like neck, Nigersaurus cropped
mouthfuls of soft plants close to the ground—probably ferns and horsetails.
FIELD SITE
Illustration © C. Abraczinskas and P. Sereno
This is a map showing Gadoufoua, the area in which the 1997 and 2000
expedition teams searched for fossils.
In local lore, “Gadoufoua” means “the
place where camels fear to tread.” and is the fossil-rich area of the Sahara Desert where Nigersaurus was
found.
It is a forbidding region void of water or wells, but to paleontologists it
is a fossil paradise, home to one of the richest concentrations of fossils of the Cretacious age.
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Photo © M. Hettwer
DESERT WASTELAND
The discovery site is located in the sandy Ténéré Desert in the Sahara;
110 million years ago,
it was a lush environment with broad rivers.
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