In 1997, when paleontologist Paul Sereno first began to unearth the remains of a dinosaur in Niger's Sahara Desert, he didn’t know what to think. He was excavating bones in a dry region called Gadoufaoua, which had a rich fossil bed first discovered by French uranium miners. There were a lot of light, aerated bones — usually associated with theropods, like Tyrannosaurus rex, and the birds that evolved from them — so the researchers assumed that was what they were dealing with.
As Sereno began to piece together the fossils, he realized it must be a sauropod, or long-necked dinosaur. Most of the bones appeared fairly typical for long-necked dinosaurs —except for its bizarrely-shaped head. Eventually, back in the lab, Sereno had to ask for a second opinion from colleagues who worked on fossil fish and other reptiles before he figured it out.
There are a lot of strange-looking dinosaurs out there. But Nigersaurus taqueti (pronounced NI-juhr-SOR-us) might sit at the top of the list. The sauropod's jaw looks almost like a large nail clipper, with large rows of hundreds of teeth on its upper and lower jaws. It almost didn’t seem to fit into its skull when Sereno was trying to piece it together.
“It’s something that really takes the cake for amazing cranial adaptations in this group, the long-necked dinosaurs,” says Sereno, a professor of paleontology at the University of Chicago. “It’s just a majestic example of evolution.”
