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‘Rarest of rare' animal spotted in Texas desert

‘Rarest of rare' animal spotted in Texas desert

USA Today10-03-2025

'Rarest of rare' animal spotted in Texas desert
Editor's note: A version of this post was first published on March 30, 2022.
The desert mule deer is a common sight in the Trans-Pecos region of west Texas, but when wildlife biologists conducted surveys recently, they came across an extremely uncommon sight.
In fact, it was what they called 'the rarest of rare' animals.
What the Texas Parks and Wildlife—Trans-Pecos Wildlife District spotted from a helicopter and captured in video was a melanistic (black hair) mule deer fawn, 'a one-in-a-million anomaly.'
Also on FTW Outdoors: Cobra is the center of an unusual sighting at African waterhole (video)
'This special deer appears all black except for quick flashes of white fur as it dashes away from the whirring helicopter,' the Fort Worth Star-Telegram said. 'It stands in stark contrast to the older, larger mule deer running ahead of it, sporting the typical brown and white coloration.'
The video was posted on Facebook with credit to District 1 biologists J. Etchart and J. Weaver.
'It's difficult for biologists to quantify the number of mule deer that have this condition, but it's estimated to be around 1 in several million – making it even more rare than an albino (all white hair) or piebald (white spotted) mule deer. A one-in-a-million anomaly.'

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The cast of the skull of Nigersaurus. The fossil skull of Nigersaurus was one of the first dinosaur skulls to be digitally reconstructed from CT scans. Photograph by Ira Block, Nat Geo Image Collection What dinosaur has 500 teeth and replaced each and every one of them every 14 days? With 15 times more teeth than the human set of 32, Nigersaurus taqueti hacked through low-lying vegetation with choppers like a lawn mower, paleontologist and National Geographic Explorer Paul Sereno told National Geographic just years after he and colleagues first described and named the dinosaur. About as heavy as an adult African forest elephant, this dinosaur would have weighed about two tons and stretched about 30 feet long from nose to the tip of its tail. The herbivore wandered lowlands of western Africa about 105 million years ago in what's now the Republic of Niger. Nigersaurus was one of the most effective plant-eating creatures to have ever evolved. 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The count on Nigersaurusindicated that each of its teeth was replaced every two weeks, he notes, with seven replacements forming behind the exposed tooth at any one time. The shape of the dinosaur's jaws offered a clue to its dental overachieving. The muzzle of Nigersaurus was square, like a vacuum. Square muzzle shapes are common among animals that graze low to the ground, a hint that Nigersaurus did so too. "Its mouth appears designed for nipping rather than chomping or chewing," Sereno said in a 2007 interview with National Geographic. Wear patterns suggest Nigersaurus' teeth slid by one another like a pair of shears. Such low-growing plants are often tough to eat. Plants like horsetails contain tough, crystal-like material called silica, and vegetation that grew low to the ground would also have a lot of sand or other grit in it Wilson Mantilla says. Feeding on such roughage would have worn down the dinosaur's teeth very quickly, and so Nigersaurus evolved to replace its teeth fast. (Scientists find a new titanosaur dinosaur species in Patagonia.) Experts still have a lot to learn about Nigersaurus and how it evolved to be different from other plant-eating dinosaurs. Studying the unusual herbivore might help experts better understand how such dinosaurs spread all over the planet and thrived for so many millions of years. In time, bones that started as mysteries in the desert may unlock new paleo puzzles. How did researchers piece together Nigersaurus? Paleontologists uncovered the bones of many individual Nigersaurus from Gadofaoua, but no single complete skeleton. Thanks to cutting-edge technology, however, Wilson Mantilla and colleagues were able to make digital scans of the collected Nigersaurus bones in 2007 and adjust them to the same scale to create a reconstruction of the dinosaur. 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