Fulfilling the dreams of child paleontologists everywhere, the skeletal remains of a possible sauropod, the group that includes the iconic brachiosaurus genus, have been found in a backyard. The 82-foot-long skeleton was uncovered in Pombal, a city in central Portugal.
In 2017, the property owner noticed some fragments of fossilized bones during a backyard construction project. The owner contacted a research team who investigated the site and launched an excavation campaign. Between August 1 and 10 of this year, Portuguese and Spanish paleontologists working on the site have unearthed what could be the remains of the largest sauropod dinosaur ever found in Europe.
[Related: This fossilized dinosaur embryo is curled up just like a baby bird.]
“It is not usual to find all the ribs of an animal like this, let alone in this position, maintaining their original anatomical position. This mode of preservation is relatively uncommon in the fossil record of dinosaurs, in particular sauropods, from the Portuguese Upper Jurassic”, said Elisabete Malafaia, Postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (Ciências ULisboa), Portugal, in a press release.
Sauropods were long-necked, long-tailed, herbivorous dinosaurs that stood on four legs (or quadrupedal). The smallest sauropods stood at about 50 feet and the largest (Brachiosaurus) standing at an astounding 98 feet tall and weighed over 170,000 pounds.
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