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pharmer4
Metallica Fanatic
Joined: 16 Aug 2005
Posts: 1960
Location: Deniliquin, Australia
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 Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 6:36 pm Post subject: newly identified "vacuum" dinosaur |
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when I see things like this, I wonder just how accurate Hanna/Barbera were with the Flintstones - here we have the identification of a dinosaur whose jaw is designed to be like a vacuum cleaner - it could be a predecessor of an elephant, or even pigeons (pigeons are unique amongst birds in that they can use their beak like a straw to drink water - other bird need to fill their beak and flip their head back - watch them some time for what I am talking about).
So, this dinosaur's bones were discovered some decades ago, but only now have they published findings of how it's mouth works.
All it's teeth are in the front of the jaw, with replacement sets behind similar to a shark. It uses these to shred food, and the vacuum set up of the rest of the jaw sucks it all up into the gullet to be swallowed. ingenious.
original article form newspaper:
| Quote: | Dinosaur found with vacuum-cleaner mouth
Posted on Thu, Nov. 15, 2007
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON -- A dinosaur with a strange jaw designed to hoover-up food grazed in what is now the Sahara Desert 110 million years ago.
Remains of the creature that "flabbergasted" paleontologist Paul Sereno went on display Thursday at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society, where they will remain until March.
Sereno and colleagues recovered, assembled and named the creature - Nigersaurus taqueti - that he said seems to break all the rules, yet still existed.
"The biggest eureka moment was when I was sitting at the desk with this jaw," he said. "I was sitting down just looking at it and saw a groove and ... realized that all the teeth were up front."
It's not normally a good idea to have all the teeth in the front of the jaw - hundreds in this case.
Sure, "it's great for nipping," Sereno said, "but that's not where you want do your food processing."
"That was an amazing moment, we knew we had something no one had ever seen before," Sereno recalled.
Sereno, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence and paleontologist at the University of Chicago, said the first evidence of Nigersaurus was found in the 1990s and now researchers have been able to reconstruct its skull and skeleton.
While Nigersaurus' mouth is shaped like the wide intake slot of a vacuum, it has something lacking in most cleaners - hundreds of tiny, sharp teeth to grind up its food.
The 30-foot-long Nigersaurus had a feather-light skull held close to the ground to graze like an ancient cow. Sereno described it as a younger cousin of the North American dinosaur Diplodicus.
Its broad muzzle contained more than 50 columns of teeth lined up tightly along the front edge of it's jaw. Behind each tooth more were lined up as replacements when one broke off.
Using CT scans the researchers were able study the inside of the animal's skull where the orientation of canals in the organ that helps keep balance disclosed the habitual low pose of the head, they reported.
Nigersaurus also had a backbone consisting of more air than bone.
"The vertebrae are so paper-thin that it is difficult to imagine them coping with the stresses of everyday use - but we know they did it, and they did it well," Jeffrey Wilson, assistant professor at the University of Michigan and an expedition team member, said in a statement.
The dinosaur's anatomy and lifestyle were to be detailed in the Nov. 21 issue of PLoS ONE, the online journal from the Public Library of Science, and in the December issue of National Geographic magazine.
The first bones of Nigersaurus were picked up in Niger in the 1950s by French paleontologists led by Philippe Taquet, but the species was not named at that time. Sereno and his team honored this early work by naming Nigersaurus taqueti after the nation where it was found and the French scientist.
The research was partly funded by National Geographic where, Sereno said, "you can see the hideous jaw elements in person." |
source: http://www.miamiherald.com/new.....08930.html
link to original scientific paper: http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0001230
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marinaroz
Grey Scaled
Joined: 04 Mar 2004
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Location: Israel
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| Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 1:48 am Post subject: |
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Wow, I would have liked to see a reconstruction of this monster. Very cool.
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snigna
Novice Poster
Joined: 07 Dec 2007
Posts: 14
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| Posted: Fri Dec 07, 2007 2:20 pm Post subject: |
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| Man, what kind of dinosaur isn't there? Soon to be found: the coffee machine dino, called the coffosaurus... |
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M0ose
SPAMMING IST VERBOTEN!
Joined: 10 Nov 2004
Posts: 1552
Location: I am 48.
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| Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2007 1:17 pm Post subject: |
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Haha, sorry, but the name cracked me up. Now, I'm Mr. Nigersaurus on Myspace.  This sounds like a really awesome find. Usually we suspect old creatues to be huge with big teeth more suitable to run and gun then anything else. With this find, they have found a key development feature that was never quite expected. This really proves that science and the world as we know it is nothing but an adventure and constant wonder.
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martinz
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Joined: 01 Oct 2007
Posts: 287
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| Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2007 11:05 pm Post subject: |
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| I suppose the cells that create the dinosaur did not really go extinct, there are great resemblance of the present animal forms to those dinosaurs hundreds of millions years ago. |
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jthomsonmain
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Joined: 11 Jan 2008
Posts: 80
Location: Albion, NY (USA)
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| Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 6:31 pm Post subject: |
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The vast number of living organisms that once existed and currently exist on our planet is phenomenal! The way they work is even more interesting! There are Eukaryotes, Prokaryotes, Protists, Cryptozoa, and many more classifications of organisms, each containing thousands or millions of organisms! Just take a look at a few:
[img:a9d2a2fe46]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Paramecium.jpg[/img:a9d2a2fe46]
[img:a9d2a2fe46]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Chaos_diffluens.jpg[/img:a9d2a2fe46]
[img:a9d2a2fe46]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Laurencia.jpg[/img:a9d2a2fe46]
[img:a9d2a2fe46]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bacillus_odysseyi.jpg[/img:a9d2a2fe46]
Those are just the simple organisms! There are so many different kinds of dinosaurs!
- Triceratops
- Edmontonia
- Stegosaurus
- Tyrannosaurus
- Ornithischian
- Edmontosaurus
- Saurischian
- Struthiomimus
- Brachiosaurus
- Camptosaurus
- Iguanodon
- Shantungosaurus
- Dryosaurus
- Corythosaurus
- Heterodontosaurus
^ And thats just a random list of a fraction of whats out there! If you are interested in this stuff, you may want to look at this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaurs
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