It lived 110 million years ago, had hundreds of teeth and used its mouth, scientists believe, like a vacuum cleaner.

A remarkable reconstruction of the Nigersaurus taqueti shows a dinosaur with an odd shovel-shaped mouth, packed with 50 columns of teeth.

The Nigersaurus grew to lengths of 13 metres (30ft) and had a long neck, but it could barely lift its head above its shoulders. It would have grazed on ferns, horsetails and other surface shrubs. The straight edge of its muzzle would have allowed it to crop vegetation virtually to its roots, like a living lawnmower.

Computer scans of the creature’s teeth and jaws have also revealed that up to nine sets of replacements grew behind each cutting tooth, giving it a total of more than 500.

“Among dinosaurs, the Nigersaurus sets the Guinness record for tooth replacement,” said Professor Paul Sereno, of the University of Chicago, who led the research team.

The first bones of the Nigersaurus were discovered in the 1950s. Further bones, including the first skull, were found in Niger, West Africa, in 1997 by Didier Duthiel, a member of Professor Sereno’s team.

The creature was named in 1999. The second part comes from Philippe Taquet, a French palaeontologist who identified its bones as distinctive in the 1970s.A fuller picture of how it lived and ate has now been published in the journal Public Library of Science One.

The reconstruction has been published in National Geographic magazine, which funds parts of Professor Sereno’s research. The scans of the skull have revealed small canals inside the brain which balanced the head, suggesting that its snout and mouth were usually pointed towards the plants on the ground that it grazed on.

Professor Lawrence Witmer, of Ohio University, who made images of the brain, said: “What we have here is the first good look at a sauropod brain, and it has important things to say about this animal’s posture and behaviour.”

The creature was a smaller cousin of the North American Diplodocus, and the new research suggests that its downward-facing muzzle may be typical of other diplodocid dinosaurs from the Mesozoic period from 245 million to 65 million years ago.

“Some of these unusual sauropods thrived to become the preeminent ground-level feeders of the Mesozoic,” said Jeffrey Wilson, of the University of Michigan, a member of the research team. He said another curious anatomical feature of the Nigersaurus was its “paper-thin” backbone, made as much of air as of bone.“It is difficult to imagine them coping with the stresses of everyday use – but we know that they did,” he added.

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