A giant dinosaur rib cage believed to have belonged to a fossilized Brachiosaurus Sauropod skeleton was discovered in the backyard of a man in Pombal, Portugal, a team of Portuguese and Spanish researchers said last week.
The breed of Sauropods that the team believes the remains belonged to lived during the late Jurassic era through the early Cretaceous era, as far back as 160 million years ago, the researchers said in a news release.
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Sauropods include the world’s largest dinosaurs, which are quadrupedal herbivores, and are identified through their long necks and tails. Researchers estimate that the dinosaur uncovered in Portugal was around 39 feet high and 82 feet long.
Researchers said the fossils already uncovered belonged to the creatures’ vertebrae and rib cage and believe more of the creature’s body could still be identifiable due to the conditions of the fossils. This assumption will be tested upon further excavation at a later date.
“It is not usual to find all the ribs of an animal like this, let alone in this position, maintaining their original anatomical position,” Elisabete Malafaia, a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, said in the release. “This mode of preservation is relatively uncommon in the fossil record of dinosaurs, in particular sauropods, from the Portuguese Upper Jurassic.”
The researchers completed their latest excavation of what could be Europe’s largest dinosaur find on Aug. 10. The discovery was initially reported to the team in 2017 after a man believed he found dinosaur fossils behind his house while doing construction work. The first excavation was done later that year, according to the news release.
The excavation was a joint operation between Instituto Dom Luiz at Ciencias ULisboa in Portugal, the Evolutionary Biology Group at UNED-Madrid, and the Faculty of Fine Arts at Complutense University of Madrid in Spain. The project was backed by the Pombal City Council.
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The discovery comes on the heels of the remains of a bipedal predatory dinosaur called a “Spinosaurid” being discovered on the Isle of Wight off the south coast of England in June. A 170 million-year-old pterodactyl skeleton was additionally uncovered in Scotland in February.
