500 Teeth Dinosaur: Largest Mouth Herbivore is Nigersaurus

According to carbon tests with fossil remains, this giant mouthed dinosaur lived about 105 million years ago. It is challenging to survive in the world as humans, while these dinosaurs eat leaves from the tree.

Today we have ruthless billionaires and bad politicians. But when compared to dinosaurs, they're not too bad.

In 1965, a french scientist found fossils of this dinosaur species for the first time. There is even a word invented for those interested in the remains of dinosaurs. These people are called paleontologists.

Philippe Taquet, a French paleontologist, made the first discovery of the 500-tooth dinosaur. However, in the 2000s, the in-depth studies of his American colleague Paul Sereno revealed what a particular type of dinosaur Nigersaurus was.

You can see the three-dimensional models of this dinosaur above. By the way, I want to share a little information. As you know, three-dimensional modeling technologies developed a lot in the 2000s. Scientists provide the opportunity to create 3D models of dinosaurs from skeletons.

The advancement of this technology has also made the science of dinosaur research more popular. It is easy to understand what the animal looks like for professional eyes, but for ordinary people like us, such 3d models are more useful.

If I hadn't seen the 3D model of the Nigersaurus, I would never have imagined how 500 teeth fit into its mouth.

This dinosaur has a straight mouth. The upper and lower parts of the flat mouth have tiny teeth that look like those of cats. Of course, not as small as that of cats. Considered only as a proportion, the dinosaur has small teeth for its body.

These teeth help him eat the grass in the trees better. Because Nigersaurus is a herbivorous dinosaur, it has a small head and a long body. Its head is relatively small compared to its body. Thanks to its long and lively neck, it can easily reach high branches.

The bones of this dinosaur species have been found in the region of Niger in West Africa. Interestingly, the place where the Nigersaurus lives is now in the desert. However, during the time of the dinosaurs, it was a green place with spring waters. It hosted not only dinosaurs but also different types of fish and other creatures. The skeletons of a herbivorous dinosaur are found in the middle of the desert also indicate how variable the Earth's climate is.

This solitary skeleton lived with many different animal groups during his lifetime. Many of these animal groups have become extinct. And when an animal goes extinct, the world becomes a lonely place.

Although Nigersaurus is the most toothed dinosaur, it is not the largest. At that time, the largest herbivorous dinosaur that lived in that area was the titanosaurian sauropods.

Our generation met dinosaurs thanks to the Jurassic Park movie. Frankly, I didn't even know the existence of dinosaurs before watching this movie.

Maybe that's why I felt the impact of the film more intensely than it was. I had a similar feeling when I read the book Sapiens, which allowed me to learn about other human species' existence.We are one of the homo-sapiens, a human species. However, there were various types of people outside of us. While there were stronger ones among them, there were also smaller ones.

The dwarves and elves in The Lord of the Rings movie may be real. The world lived millions of years ago; these stories seem fantastic when we watch them now. The world is older than we thought. Before human history, there was human history.

So why is there no species left but Sapiens? There are various theories for this, but the most sound theory is that Sapiens captured them by breeding and killing them.

The Sapiens species was a more intelligent species than any other species. For this reason, it took its place in history as the most dominant human species.

The same is true for dinosaurs. Some dinosaurs are smarter; others are more powerful. Enormous dinosaurs that look very strong are usually herbivorous.

When I watched the Jurassic Park movie, I did not have the intellectual background to judge whether a film was good or bad. I was tiny, and I thought everything I saw on the screen was real.

This made the movies fascinating for me. But as I grew older, I realized that reality was different. The truth consists of our own experiences. We can learn from even movies, but none of them are as strong and enduring as what we learned from our own experience.

I would have liked to be in the lifetime of this 500-toothed dinosaur and to discover the creatures there as well as everyone else.

I hope this article was useful to you. See you.

Other Dinosaur Types

Dinosaurs, a super diverse group of animals, left behind a long line of fossilized footprints. Over the years, paleontologists have identified more than 800 types of dinosaur. 

Although it can be hard to identify which dinosaur types are which due to poor fossil records and overlapping characteristics (for example, the differences between Hadrosaurs, Lambeosaurs and Iguanodonts), knowing their assorted names makes it a little easier to talk about them in general terms. 

Even if you don’t get into the weeds of naming every Dinosaur type; it helps to know that different species have different names.

Despite our great 500 teeth dinosaur, let’s explore other types!

Stegosaurus

The Stegosaurus lived during the late Jurassic, between 155 and 150 million years ago. 

A strong powerful animal, it was equipped with a spiked tail to prevent attack from predators. 

To defend itself, it used its powerful front legs to swing its long spiked tail around it in an impressive arc which would scoop up any attacker that was unfortunate enough to get in its way.

Velociraptor

The velociraptor was a large, fast, and agile dinosaur.  Nevertheless, despite the fact that it is a very popular dinosaur in the media nowadays, so far I have been more impressed with other dinosaurs in our journey through the prehistoric times

However, this dinosaur might not be as bad as you thought, so let’s examine it more closely. 

Spinosaurus

It was a giant terrestrial predator. Similar in size to Tyrannosaurus, Spinosaurus was even more heavily built, and therefore its center of mass was located farther back on its body, making it less able to run.

Tyrannosaurus Rex

Tyrannosaurus rex is the biggest dinosaur of all time. He has probably been in more movies, documentaries, games and toys than any other dinosaur. And yet he also has always been the most mysterious and elusive of all dinosaurs. Until very recently, there were many who doubted whether such a large animal ever existed. But now we know that it did.

Hadrosaurus

Hadrosaurus foulkii was a medium-sized duckbilled dinosaur and the first dinosaur known to be Brontosaurus. It was the official state fossil of New Jersey, until it was replaced by the state insect, the firefly.  Hadrosaurus differed from other hadrosaurs in that it walked on its hind legs rather than all fours. This made Hadrosaurus able to see farther as it could stand higher off the ground.

Parasaurolophus

With such a bizarre head crest, Parasaurolophus would not have been likely to escape notice, even if it had stayed out of the public eye. 

The dinosaur’s crest was composed of thin, tubular bones that were arranged like a large fishing pole. 

Inside this tube, there were chambers which housed passages for air that blew through nasal passages at the end of the crest in order to make a distinctively resonating sound when Parasaurolophus exhaled or inhaled.