Paleontologists have unveiled a 110-million-year-old dinosaur from Africa. The mouth is powered through a greenery, like a vacuum. The Nigersaurus taqueti was discovered in the Sahara by Paul Sereno, of the University of Chicago and his team in 1997.
"Among dinosaurs, the Nigersaurus sets the Guinness record for tooth replacement," Mr Sereno joked.
"The vertebrae are so paper-thin that it is difficult to imagine them coping with the stresses of everyday use, but we know that they did," said Jeffrey Wilson, of the University of Michigan.
According to the Los Angeles Times, "The dinosaur was a member of the sauropod family of plant-eating dinosaurs and was a younger cousin of the more familiar North American dinosaur Diplodocus. At 30 feet in length, Nigersaurus was relatively small for a sauropod, and its skull was unusually thin and light -- so much so that it was virtually translucent.
Its elongated neck was also thin and fragile, he said, suggesting that it was highly adapted for eating plants at ground level and not for plucking leaves from trees. Sereno called them the "cows of the Mesozoic" era."
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