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

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