36
Excavations carried out in the backyard of a house in the quiet town of Pombal, in central Portugal, may have revealed one of the largest dinosaur fossils ever found in Europe.
A team of Portuguese and Spanish paleontologists has recovered part of an exceptionally large skeleton of a sauropod: a giant herbivore known for having a very long neck and tail.
“The whole rib was very massive. We started digging and the rib went on and on, the length really kept increasing”, explains paleontologist Elisabete Malafaia, a researcher at the Instituto Dom Luís, at the University of Lisbon.
“At one point, we knew that the longest dorsal rib known so far was around 2.70 meters, and we had already surpassed that. We continued to excavate and the biggest one we found is about three meters long,” she adds.
Read more in Folha de S. Paulo
