BY GEOFF LARCOM
The Ann Arbor News
For 10 years, the paleontologists worked to make sense of the bizarre find in the African desert. It was a dinosaur with a squared-off mouth that seemed to work like a vacuum cleaner. It had hundreds of tiny teeth and barely any spine.
Slowly the researchers pieced together the puzzle in the desert in Niger. Today, University of Michigan professor Jeff Wilson and the rest of the research team will watch as their discovery is unveiled in Washington by the National Geographic Society.
The dinosaur, Nigersaurus taqueti, was a smaller, plant-eating cousin of the more familiar North American dinosaur Diplodocus. But, unlike its relatives, Nigersaurus was barely able to lift its head above its back and grazed more like a cow than a giraffe.
A reconstruction of the dinosaur's skeleton, a model of the head and neck, and the actual, 110-million-year-old fossils discovered in the desert will be on display today as National Geographic promotes its December magazine cover story on "Big Bad Bizarre Dinosaurs."
The decade-long journey of discovery began in the Tenere Desert in the remote regions of north Africa. Wilson and his mentor, Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago, were among the group that discovered the bones on an expedition in 1997, while Wilson was a graduate student at the University of Chicago.
They were studying what had happened to Africa at the end of the dinosaur age when they found a strange-looking creature in slightly younger rocks dating from the middle of the Cretaceous Era. This was no normal sauropod, such as the long-necked Diplodocus or Brontosaurus. It had a strange skull, with its teeth extending out laterally, along with a short neck and an incredibly delicate spine, Wilson said.
There was much work to be done. To avoid breaking the bones, the scientists put them under a CAT scan, then built models of them, Wilson said.
They deduced that, unlike most sauropods, which dine on high-hanging trees, Nigersaurus was feeding off the ground, dining on horsetails or ferns. It measured about 18 feet from its head to the end of its tail.
John Whitlock, a Ph.D. candidate who studies under Wilson at U-M, examined the teeth in detail. Whitlock observed the small scratches and pits that represented the dinosaur's last few meals, and determined that Nigersaurus ate soft vegetation.
Wilson says the discovery showed a whole new way such dinosaurs gathered nutrition, and also indicated how widely that group might have circulated, to areas such as South America, England and Croatia, Wilson said.
Wilson left the University of Chicago for U-M in 1999, but he frequently returned to Chicago to work with Sereno throughout the next eight years.
The initial, month-long adventure to the site was rigorous because of the remote location. The group flew into London, took a ferry to France, then drove to Marseilles. They took another ferry across the Mediterranean Sea to the port city of Algiers, then drove across the desert to get to Niger.
Wilson said the team needed guards because of political instability in the area at that time. They carried in their water and cooked all of their own dried food.
Now, a decade later, Wilson is excited about attending today's unveiling.
"I just love that moment," he says. "You can reflect back on what you did."
Geoff Larcom can be reached at 734-994-6838 or email@example.com.