Nigersaurus Facts for Kids
nee-ZHAIR-uh-SORE-us · its name means “Niger lizard”
A plant-eater with a wide, flat mouth and rows of tiny teeth.
- 📏 49 ft15 m1 long
- ⚖️ weight: not yet checked
- 🕰️ the Cretaceous
- 🍽️ plants
Nigersaurus ate plants. It had a wide, flat mouth like a vacuum cleaner. It had lots and lots of tiny teeth.
Nigersaurus held its head low to munch soft plants near the ground. Its mouth was wide and straight across, like the end of a vacuum cleaner. Rows of tiny teeth sat ready behind the front ones, so a new tooth popped into place as an old one wore out.
Nigersaurus was a sauropod, a cousin of Diplodocus, but with a shorter neck and a face built for mowing. Its jaws were wider than its skull, and they held more teeth than almost any other dinosaur, with spares stacked behind them. Its bones were light and full of air spaces, so many were thin and fragile. It lived in what is now the Sahara Desert, when the land there was green, with rivers.
Every dinosaur number is scientists’ best guess from bones, so each one says where it came from.
How big was Nigersaurus?
Nigersaurus in numbers
| Length (nose to tail) | 49 ft15 m1one museum's estimate from fossils; it is the only checked number we have |
|---|---|
| Height at the hips | no checked number yet |
| Weight | no checked number yet |
| When it lived | no checked number yet |
| What it ate | soft, low plants such as ferns and horsetails |
| Fossils found in | the Sahara Desert in Niger, in Africa, which was green with rivers then |
| What kind | a sauropod: a giant long-necked plant-eater |
Wow!
- Its mouth was wider than the rest of its head.
- New teeth kept stepping in as old ones wore out.
- It lived where the Sahara Desert is now, when it was green.
🦴 Nigersaurus’s bones
Books about Nigersaurus, free at the library
Ask a grown-up to tap the button: it shows where to borrow a book about Nigersaurus for free.
Where was the land back then?
The continents were in different places when Nigersaurus lived, in the Cretaceous. Open Planet Earth, pick Drifting continents, and slide back in time to see where the land was.
Its neighbours in time
Where these numbers come from
- Wikidata, from the Natural History Museum's Dino Directory, checked 31 October 2026.
- Wikidata, Nigersaurus (Q18511062), checked 30 October 2026.
To read more: the Natural History Museum’s Dino Directory (see also, not copied).