Scientists showcase hoover-mouthed dino

Over 110 million years ago, a plant-eating dinosaur walked the earth with a mouth designed to vacuum up food, the National Geographic Society revealed Thursday morning in Washington, D.C.

Discoverer Paul Sereno, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence and paleontologist at the University of Chicago, has named the elephant-sized dinosaur Nigersauras taqueti, after the discovery site, the African country of Niger, and French paleontologist Philippe Taquet.
The Nigersaurus Skeleton
(Gabrielle Lyon, courtesy Project Exploration)

Evidence of the nine-meter-long, four-tonne Nigersaurus was first found in the 1950s by French paleontologists, but the species was not named at the time.

Sereno named the dinosaur in 1999, after finding a few bones in the Sahara. A team member spotted skull bones in 1997, and over the next few expeditions, researchers were able to collect about 80 per cent of the skeleton, allowing them to reconstruct the Nigersaurus. Key details of the dinosaur's anatomy and lifestyle were not known until recently, however.

The dinosaur's mouth is shaped like the intake slot of a vacuum and paired with more than 50 columns consisting of hundreds of tiny, needle-sharp teeth to grind up its food. A second set of up to eight teeth was lined up behind each tooth as replacements when one broke off. A press release described the teeth as "forming, in effect, a foot-long pair of scissors."

Its feather-light, translucent skull was held close to the ground for grazing, like a cow, researchers found.