Other unique characteristics include a hinged joint in the skull which allows the fish to widen its mouth for large prey an oil-filled tube, called a notochord, which serves as a backbone thick scales common only to extinct fish and an electrosensory rostral organ in its snout likely used to detect prey. The meme in question has become iconic, originating from Spider-Man and the X-Men 2, part of a 6-issue mini-series that saw Spider-Man teaching a class of young mutants at the Jean Grey School. Compared to the number of teeth that the dinosaur has, it is a herbivore, a 30 feet long dinosaur that eats plants and herbs. The Nigersaurus was one of the earliest dinosaurs ever discovered. As the dinosaur has a bony figure with 500 teeth it looks like a lizard or a reptile.
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The name Nigersaurus means a Niger Lizard or a Niger reptile. Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University.
The most striking feature of this "living fossil" is its paired lobe fins that extend away from its body like legs and move in an alternating pattern, like a trotting horse. Here are all the dinosaur exhibits you can visit from east coast to west coast: 1. Scientists estimate they can live up to 60 years or more. They can be huge, reaching 6.5 feet or more and weighing 198 pounds. Many scientists believe that the unique characteristics of the coelacanth represent an early step in the evolution of fish to terrestrial four-legged animals like amphibians.Ĭoelacanths are elusive, deep-sea creatures, living in depths up to 2,300 feet below the surface. There are only two known species of coelacanths: one that lives near the Comoros Islands off the east coast of Africa, and one found in the waters off Sulawesi, Indonesia. But its discovery in 1938 by a South African museum curator on a local fishing trawler fascinated the world and ignited a debate about how this bizarre lobe-finned fish fits into the evolution of land animals. The primitive-looking coelacanth (pronounced SEEL-uh-kanth) was thought to have gone extinct with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.