November 15, 2007
U. of C. scientist unveils skeleton of plant-eating dinosaur
National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and paleontologist Paul Sereno unveiled a new dinosaur at the National Geographic Society in Washington on Thursday. It is an elephant-sized animal named Nigersaurus taqueti. (AP photo by Lauren Victoria Burke / November 15, 2007)
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University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno today unveiled his latest discovery: the fossilized skeleton of a toothy plant-eating dinosaur with a body as big as an elephant and a relatively small cow-sized head.
Sereno and teams he headed recovered fossilized bones of the beast, dubbed Nigersaurus taqueti, on expeditions in 1997 and 1999 to a remote region of the Sahara Desert in the West African nation of Niger. It took eight years for scientists to piece together bones of many specimens in Sereno's Chicago lab to get a nearly complete skeleton.
Unveiled at the National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, D.C., the skeleton finally puts a face and body on an animal that science had known only from a few scattered bones found elsewhere in Africa in the 1950s.
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New knowledge from the discovery is expected to inspire scientists to reconsider the family tree of giant plant-eating dinosaurs called sauropods.
"Putting the whole thing together is a sort of a real eye-opener for paleontology," said Thomas Holtz, a University of Maryland vertebrate paleontologist not associated with Sereno's Niger expeditions. "This is a case of, after putting all the pieces of the puzzle together, the puzzle is more confusing than ever. The bits and pieces of Nigersaurus are weird, but seeing the whole thing together, it is even weirder."
Nigersaurus sported an almost perfectly squared-off jaw lined with 128 uniform front teeth, the only kind of teeth it had. When the creature closed its mouth, the rows would have joined perfectly to snip plants that the dinosaur ate.
"In modern mammals, when you see broad muzzles, you know that they are animals are grazers that eat grass, like cattle," said Sereno. "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."
The anatomy of Nigersaurus thus seems to run counter to the prevailing idea that all sauropods, such as the long-necked Diplodocus, got their sustenance by raising their necks into trees to get at leaves and bark. What it might have been eating at ground level, however, is a mystery.
"The only direct evidence of plants that we find at this place and time are giant sequoia-like trees," said Sereno.
He guesses that the forest floor 110 million years ago, when Nigersaurus lived, might have been covered with ferns, horsetails and other ground-cover plants that it could snip off and swallow.
Sereno is the lead author of a paper on Nigersaurus published today in the online science journal Public Library of Science ONE. It will also be featured in a cover story on "Extreme Dinosaurs" in the December issue of National Geographic.
His co-authors on the article were Jeffrey Wilson and John Whitlock at the University of Michigan; Lawrence Witmer of Ohio State University; Abdoulaya Maga and Oumarou Ide of the University of Niamey in Niger; and Timothy Rowe of the University of Texas.
Sereno took 10 Chicago high school students with him for the dinosaur unveiling at the National Geographic headquarters. They are members of Project Exploration, a nonprofit science education organization Sereno and his wife, Gabrielle Lyon, have run for several years.
Project Exploration is designed to use dinosaur research to attract students, especially from urban schools, to careers in science.
Sereno is a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, and his work is funded in part by National Geographic, along with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Pritzker Foundation and the Women's Board of the University of Chicago.
wmullen@tribune.com
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
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