Member-only story
The Dinosaur With 500 Teeth You’ve Probably Never Heard of
It’s a Nigersaurus (pronounced nee-ZHER-sore-us)
I memorized a lot of dinosaur names as a kid. Like most six-year-olds, I loved dinosaurs. They were my favorite thing to learn about at school. But I’d never heard of the dinosaur with 500 teeth.
That’s because the dinosaur with 500 teeth didn’t even have a name when I was at elementary school. In fact, it was only discovered a few years before I was born.
My favorite dinosaur was the diplodocus because we were told it was the longest dinosaur of all. Plus I wanted to be different from all the other kids, who loved the T-Rex.
Maybe if I’d have known about the dinosaur with 500 teeth, that would have been my favorite.
What’s more, it would have blown my little six-year-old mind to have known there were still dinosaurs being discovered, and dinosaurs without names. I assumed that adults already knew everything there was to be known about dinosaurs.
The dinosaur with 500 teeth didn’t even get a name until 1999. So who is this dinosaur?
What is the dinosaur with 500 teeth?
The dinosaur with 500 teeth is the Nigersaurus (pronounced nee-ZHER-sore-us).
It’s called the Nigersaurus because fossils of the dinosaur were first discovered in the Republic of Niger in northwest Africa in 1976. Remains have since been found in Algeria and Tunisia.
It had lots of teeth because it loved to chew on plants such as ferns. The teeth were soft and got worn out quickly, so it grew a new set of teeth as often as every 14 days. That makes it the fastest teeth-replacing dinosaur.
How big was the Nigersaurus?
The Nigersaurs was about nine meters (30 feet) long, about twice as long as a giraffe. Unlike the giraffe, it had a short neck.
It weighed around four tons. This is similar to the weight of an elephant or a white rhino. It’s about four times the weight of a bison.
