While doing renovations on his property, a Portuguese man stumbled upon a fossilized sauropod that might be the largest dinosaur skeleton ever found in Europe.
It all started in 2017. While carrying out construction work, the owner of the property in central Portugal noticed the presence of several fragments of fossilized bones in his yard. He called scientific authorities, and last month they unearthed several “important” skeletal elements of a beast that may have been 82 feet long (25 meters).
“It’s one of the biggest specimens discovered in Europe, perhaps in the world,” Elisabete Malafaia, a paleontologist from the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, tells Agence France-Presse.
So far, an important set of elements of the axial skeleton has been collected from the site, which includes vertebrae and ribs.
“It is not usual to find all the ribs of an animal like this, let alone in this position, maintaining their original anatomical position,” Malafaia adds in a statement. “This mode of preservation is relatively uncommon in the fossil record of dinosaurs, in particular sauropods, from the Portuguese Upper Jurassic.”
The preservation characteristics of the fossils and their disposition indicate the possible presence of other parts of the skeleton of this individual, a hypothesis that will be tested in future excavation campaigns in the deposit.
Europe has found several genera of Brachiosauridae on the continent, and this back garden gargant might be a Brachiosaurus altithorax, a Giraffatitan brancai, or the Late Jurassic species first found in Portugal’s West region, Lusotitan atalaiensis.
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