nOnoscience

“Daddy! Lets play animal name telling”, beckoned my four year old. “Alright kiddo”, I complied and began. Cat. Now, you tell an animal name dear. STEGOSAURUS. Now you pa. Well, Dog. Your turn. PLESIOSAUR. What about you? Hmm, Rabbit. IGUANODON. Horse. TYRANNOSAURUS. Elephant. PTERANODON (pronounced by the kid as pTEranODDOn). That did me. Wait a minute dear. I am sure you dunno what a Pteranodon means… I know, pa. Its a bird. A big one with very big beaks, unlike an eagle. Has bones in its feathers. Lived in old times. Now dead. Unrelenting, I plod, “Well, then what about this Plessi…Pleiso…what is that?” Plesiosaur lives in water Daddy. It eats all fish. Even sharks. But is dead now. Then she hit me unassumingly. What about you dad; don’t you know any dinosaur name to tell? Haven’t you read books?

Bora saved me the blushes with his email. I know an extreme dinosaur that my kid don’t. Yet.

Nigersaurus.

In a recent open access PLoS paper, titled Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur and authored by Sereno PC, Wilson JA, Witmer LM, Whitlock JA, Maga A, et al., Paul Sereno decided to publish his description of Nigersaurus, the bizzare Mesozoic relative of Diplodocus. If you are into such stuff, skip this post and read the paper from PLoS directly. Else, read it after reading this post.

Well, Bora made me read Paul’s “biology” paper and I dared. When encountering the alternate use of “familiar” words like radiation or radiating (as in “…to have radiated across both Gondwana and Laurasia during the Cretaceous…”), I needed sometime to take my head out of electromagnetic radiation, heat transfer, Boltzmann, etc. That and some relative jargons hampered my pace.

But reading the paper by Paul Cereno et al. failed to preserve my ignorance about Nigersaurus. Anway, I was driven by my kid.

Apart from unearthing the fossils of many specimens, Paul’s team have also reconstructed the Nigersaurus using digital computed tomography (software: 3D Studio Max, Zbrush, and Mimics). Click on the accompanied image for a high resolution version.

It compares with man like this

Both pictures are courtesy Paul Sereno and his Open Access PLoS paper.

As to why Nigersaurus is exciting for some of us (I admitted earlier, I was only driven by the desire to one-up my four year old kid), Bora explains

A French paleontologist, Dr. Philippe Taquet, who led the first fossil expeditions to Niger in the 1960s., brought home some bone fragments that he never named. It took three decades until more of this dinosaur was found. In 1997., a member of Paul Sereno’s team discovered the skull of a bizzare-looking dinosaurus which they named Nigersaurus taqueti in honor of their French predecessor. In 1999., Sereno brought in a crew that dug out an almost complete skeleton of this animal, a younger, smaller cousin of the Diplodocus, one of my favourite dinos since I was a little kid.

Further, as I gather from Paul and his team’s paper and Bora’s post, over the years there exist contention whether Diplodocoids were creatures that ate only from the trees - long neck with head position looking up like giraffe - or whether they included ground level plants as food because of their head position looking earthwards. Nigersaurus, with their reconstructed anatomy of a comparatively short neck and earthward looking face, suggests there should have been, “low-browsing feeding strategy among diplodocoids.” The relevant conclusion from the paper reads

Modest body length, a proportionately short neck, and downward deflection of the muzzle in Nigersaurus are conditions that characterize many diplodocoids and now represent an alternative basal condition for the clade. Nigersaurus is the culmination of a low-browsing feeding strategy among diplodocoids that originated in the mid Jurassic and may have had an ecologically significant impact on surface vegetation on several land areas during the Cretaceous.

Reading the paper further I could gather Nigersaurus seems to have possessed a functional skull made of minimal structural material. A case of so much head and so little inside. This anatomical discovery raises intrigue about - to loosely put it - the minimal critical mass for a functional skull. Also, to my fascination, based on the anatomy of the Nigersaurus, Peter ans his team speculate even on the type and extent of vegetation of the Cretacious land [gallery of possible plants]. Vegetation that should have been dino-food for this short-necked, airy skulled, tooth-to-tooth chewing cycled, herbivore Nigersaurus.

More fascinating glimpses of a Cretaceous journey awaits us at PLoS or at the Extreme Dinosaur website - courtesy Peter Serano’s timely decision to take Nigersaurus Open Access.

Reference: Sereno, P.C., Wilson, J.A., Witmer, L.M., Whitlock, J.A., Maga, A., Ide, O., Rowe, T.A., Kemp, T. (2007). Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur. PLoS ONE, 2(11), e1230. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001230