It is estimated this dinosaur was 12 metres high and 25 metres long, based on the size of the bones found in the garden. Source: Instituto Dom Luiz (Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon).
The remains of what might be the largest dinosaur ever found in Europe is being unearthed in a backyard in Pombal, Portugal.
Several fragments of fossilised bones were noticed in 2017 by the property owner while doing construction in the yard.
Researchers from the University of Lisbon were then contacted and the backyard became an excavation site to uncover what lies underneath.
Earlier this month, the Spanish and Portuguese palaeontologists managed to unearth the vertebrae and ribs of what is thought to be a brachiosaurid sauropod.
Sauropods were the biggest of all dinosaurs and the largest land animals to have ever lived.
The sauropod group consists of herbivores that walked on four legs and had long necks.
It is estimated this dinosaur was 12 metres high and 25 metres long, based on the size of the bones found in the garden.
The skeleton was found in Upper Jurassic sedimentary rocks, which suggests it is around 150 million years old.
“It is not usual to find all the ribs of an animal like this, let alone in this position, maintaining their original anatomical position,” said Elisabete Malafaia, post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon.
“This mode of preservation is relatively uncommon in the fossil record of dinosaurs, in particular sauropods, from the Portuguese Upper Jurassic.”
Researchers are also optimistic that they can uncover even more parts of the same dinosaur because of the natural position the skeleton was found in.
“The research in the Monte Agudo paleontological locality confirms that the region of Pombal has an important fossil record of Late Jurassic vertebrates, which in the last decades has provided the discovery of abundant materials very significant for the knowledge of the continental faunas that inhabited the Iberian Peninsula at about 145 million years ago,” Malafaia said.
