A Portuguese man discovered a petrified sauropod that may be the largest dinosaur skeleton ever discovered in Europe while performing renovations on his property.
Everything began in 2017. The property owner in central Portugal discovered many shards of prehistoric bones in his yard while working on
construction. He contacted experts in the field, and last month they discovered a number of ‘important’ skeleton fragments of a creature that may have been 82 feet (25 meters) in length.
Elisabete Malafaia, a paleontologist from the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon in Portugal,
told Agence France-Presse, ‘It’s one of the biggest specimens discovered in Europe, possibly in the world.’
Vertebrae and ribs are among the significant group of axial skeleton components that have so far been removed from the site.
Malafaia continues in a statement, “It is unusual to see all the ribs of an animal like this, let alone in this position,
keeping their original anatomical position. This type of preservation is exceedingly uncommon in the Upper Jurassic fossil record of dinosaurs from Portugal, particularly sauropods.
Future excavation expeditions in the deposit will test this theory in light of the fossils’ preservation qualities
and disposition, which point to the potential presence of this person’s other skeletal components.
This backyard monster could be a Brachiosaurus altithorax, a Giraffatitan brancai, or the Late Jurassic species Lusotitan atalaiensis,
which was first discovered in Portugal’s West area. Europe has discovered numerous taxa of Brachiosauridae on the continent.
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