Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 18, 2014

Nigersaurus (meaning "Niger reptile") is a genus of rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur that lived during the middle Cretaceous period, about 115 to 105 million years ago. It was discovered in the Elrhaz Formation in an area called Gadoufaoua, in Niger. Fossils of this dinosaur were first described in 1976, but it was only named in 1999. The genus contains a single species, N. taqueti, named after French palaeontologist Philippe Taquet, who discovered the first remains. At 9 m (30 ft) long—small for a sauropod—it weighed around 4 tonnes, comparable to a modern elephant. It had a wide muzzle filled with more than 500 teeth, which were replaced every 14 days. Unlike other tetrapods, its jaws were wider than the skull, its teeth were located far to the front, and it fed with its head close to the ground. It lived in a riparian habitat, and its diet probably consisted of soft plants, such as ferns, horsetails, and angiosperms. It is one of the most common fossil vertebrates found in the area, and shared its habitat with other dinosaurian megaherbivores, as well as large theropods and crocodylomorphs. (Full article...)

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