A new basal sauropod dinosaur from the middle Jurassic of Niger and the early evolution of sauropoda.

Background: The early evolution of sauropod dinosaurs is poorly understood because of a highly incomplete fossil record. New discoveries of Early and Middle Jurassic sauropods have a great potential to lead to a better understanding of early sauropod evolution and to reevaluate the patterns of sauropod diversification.

Principal Findings: A new sauropod from the Middle Jurassic of Niger, Spinophorosaurus nigerensis n.

Lakeside cemeteries in the Sahara: 5000 years of holocene population and environmental change.

Background: Approximately two hundred human burials were discovered on the edge of a paleolake in Niger that provide a uniquely preserved record of human occupation in the Sahara during the Holocene ( approximately 8000 B.C.E.

Structural extremes in a cretaceous dinosaur.

Fossils of the Early Cretaceous dinosaur, Nigersaurus taqueti, document for the first time the cranial anatomy of a rebbachisaurid sauropod. Its extreme adaptations for herbivory at ground-level challenge current hypotheses regarding feeding function and feeding strategy among diplodocoids, the larger clade of sauropods that includes Nigersaurus. We used high resolution computed tomography, stereolithography, and standard molding and casting techniques to reassemble the extremely fragile skull.

Permian tetrapods from the Sahara show climate-controlled endemism in Pangaea.

New fossils from the Upper Permian Moradi Formation of northern Niger provide an insight into the faunas that inhabited low-latitude, xeric environments near the end of the Palaeozoic era (approximately 251 million years ago). We describe here two new temnospondyl amphibians, the cochleosaurid Nigerpeton ricqlesi gen. et sp.