Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Bogelbaum. Here mesozoic cow sounds like a
Speaker 1: joke cribbed from Gary Lawson's The Far Side, But it's not.
Speaker 1: That nickname was given to the African dinosaur Nigrosaurus to
Speaker 1: ka back when some new discoveries about its appearance were
Speaker 1: made public in two thousand seven. Speaking to NPR at
Speaker 1: the time, paleontologist Pulse Orino called Nigrosaurus the weirdest dinosaur
Speaker 1: I've ever seen. He then compared its face to a
Speaker 1: vacuum cleaner and unorthodox herb. Before this red pile grazed
Speaker 1: and what's now the Sahara Desert some a hundred ten
Speaker 1: million years ago. It gathered food with a big broad mouth.
Speaker 1: The creatures snout was wider than the back of its head,
Speaker 1: and Nitrosaurus had teeth to spare hundreds. In fact, a
Speaker 1: Nitrosaurus was a little over twenty nine feet or around
Speaker 1: nine meters long by the most liberal estimates, It weighed
Speaker 1: roughly four and a half tons or four metric tons,
Speaker 1: and so overall the dinosaur was about the size of
Speaker 1: a modern African elephant. There's just one caveat you see.
Speaker 1: Nitrosaurus was soro pod, one of the major dinosaurian groups.
Speaker 1: The plant eating small headed sauropods hung around for about
Speaker 1: a hundred and forty million years. Their ranks included the
Speaker 1: largest animals to ever walk the earth. Experts say the
Speaker 1: biggest species may have been over a hundred and ten
Speaker 1: feet that's thirty three meters long, and meanwhile, forty eight
Speaker 1: five foot or twelve to sixteen meter sauropods are common
Speaker 1: throughout some parts of the fossil record. In comparison, Nitrosaurus
Speaker 1: was on the small side, but what caught everyone's attention
Speaker 1: was the dinosaurs. Mug Sereno's vacuum cleaner comparison is right
Speaker 1: on the money. Viewed from above, Nitrosaurus's wide muzzle looks
Speaker 1: like the the end of one of these household appliances.
Speaker 1: But those jaws held something never before seen in a
Speaker 1: sore pod. Dinosaur tooth or dental batteries. We're not talking
Speaker 1: about double a duras l s here. Dental batteries were
Speaker 1: efficient food processing tools used by many plant eating dinos.
Speaker 1: They consisted of vertically stacked columns of replaceable teeth. Whenever
Speaker 1: the top tooth wore out in any given column, the
Speaker 1: one right below it would move upwards and take the
Speaker 1: old tooth spot. And those tooth columns were packed right
Speaker 1: alongside each other like canned sardines, so a dinosaur armed
Speaker 1: with dental batteries could comfortably house several hundred teeth old
Speaker 1: and new inside its mouth. In Nitrosaurus's case, the upper
Speaker 1: jaws contained sixty columns of small needle shaped teeth, and
Speaker 1: no fewer than sixty eight were present on the lower jaws.
Speaker 1: Tallied together, the beast had more than five hundred individual teeth.
Speaker 1: Dinosaur hunters are used to finding dental batteries and beaked
Speaker 1: herbivores like the horned triceratops, but they're rare among the sauropods,
Speaker 1: and too. The orientation is just as important as tooth quantity.
Speaker 1: Ask anyone who's ever needed races me included all the
Speaker 1: tooth columns in Nigrosaurus is dental batteries were lined up
Speaker 1: at the very front of its mouth, a position along
Speaker 1: the muzzles gently curved outer edge. So what's the dinosaur
Speaker 1: to do with choppers like these? Nibbling on treetops probably
Speaker 1: wasn't an option. Nigrosaurus wasn't just small bodied for a sauropod.
Speaker 1: It also had a fairly short neck and no The
Speaker 1: evidence suggests Nigrosaurus fed at ground level, sort of like
Speaker 1: a cow. Nigrosaurus was named after the West African country
Speaker 1: where its fossils have been found, the Republic of Niger.
Speaker 1: Back when this animal reamed, forests and braided rivers covered
Speaker 1: the landscape, that wide muzzle was perfect scooping up ferns, horsetails,
Speaker 1: and other low lying plants, and with its bountiful teeth,
Speaker 1: the dinosaur would have had no trouble shearing through this vegetation.
Speaker 1: Eating like that can be rough on your dental health.
Speaker 1: Nigrosaurus must have worn out its tooth crowns at a
Speaker 1: rapid fire pace. Good thing it had a constant supply
Speaker 1: of fresh teeth. According to a study published in the
Speaker 1: journal Plos one, Nigrosaurus likely replaced each new tooth after
Speaker 1: just fourteen days. Because Nitrosaurus ate with its head down,
Speaker 1: experts have wondered about its posture. Sereno and his co
Speaker 1: authors once argued that the herbivore aimed its face and
Speaker 1: neck downwards whether it was feeding or not. As a
Speaker 1: matter of habit. Through a painstaking process, this team was
Speaker 1: able to reconstruct the inside of Nitrosaurus's skull, and that
Speaker 1: gave them a good look at the lateral semicircular canal
Speaker 1: or LSC of the inner ear, which helps animals keep
Speaker 1: their balance. Judging by the l SC orientation in Nigersaurus,
Speaker 1: Sereno and company hypothesized that the animal usually walked around
Speaker 1: with its snamp pointed at the ground at a sixty
Speaker 1: seven degree angle. A picture of moping teenager and you'll
Speaker 1: get the idea. Other researchers have disputed this claim, though
Speaker 1: studies released in two thousand nineteen found that the position
Speaker 1: of the LSC can't reliably tell us what any given
Speaker 1: sauropods normal head posture would have looked like. Nitrosaurus stayed
Speaker 1: under the radar for quite a while. The first known
Speaker 1: fossils belonging to this animal were recovered during the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties by French paleontologists in the Nigerian Sahara. Unfortunately, most
Speaker 1: of these bones were isolated or fragmentary. Scientists working at
Speaker 1: the time didn't even bother to give the sauropod a name.
Speaker 1: Things got more interesting in that's when a member of
Speaker 1: Sereno's field team noticed some Nigrosaurus skull bones. Over the
Speaker 1: course of two expeditions, enough material was found to reconstruct
Speaker 1: about eight percent of the beast's skeleton. And what a
Speaker 1: skeleton it was. The newfound fossils gave us our first
Speaker 1: look at the dino's complicated dental batteries and vacuum cleaner mouth.
Speaker 1: Sereno named the species Nigrosaurus to k e as an
Speaker 1: homage to paleontologist Philippe to kay In. Scientists probably would
Speaker 1: have found more Nitrosaurus remains a whole lot sooner if
Speaker 1: it hadn't been for the animal's fragile bone structure. A
Speaker 1: to quote a two thousand seven Sereno led study, this
Speaker 1: critter had a featherweight skull, several bones, and Nigrosaurus's head
Speaker 1: were under zero point zero eight inches thick that's two millimeters,
Speaker 1: and the oddities didn't stop there. Like today's birds, many
Speaker 1: prehistoric dinosaurs had hollow bones containing air sacks. Nitrosaurus vertebra
Speaker 1: took this to an extreme. Measured by volume, some of
Speaker 1: its backbones actually contained more air than well bone wayfer
Speaker 1: thin fossils aren't the easiest things to preserve and study.
Speaker 1: Hats off to the researchers doing the work today's episode.
Speaker 1: It's based on the article Nigrosaurus the Mesozoic cow with
Speaker 1: more than five teeth on how stuff works dot Com.
Speaker 1: Written by Mark Mancini. Brain Stuff is a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works dot Com,
Speaker 1: and it's produced by Tyler Clang. Four more podcasts from
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