A man doing construction work in his backyard in Portugal discovered fossilized bones, which have now been identified as the skeleton of an 82footlong dinosaur, possibly the largest ever found in Europe, according to a press release.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science said in Wednesday’s statement that the initial discovery was made in 2017 in the Portuguese city of Pombal.
Paleontologists from Portugal and Spain who have been working at the site since then say the bones could be those of a sauropod dinosaur measuring 39 feet tall and 82 feet long.
Sauropods were fourlegged, planteating dinosaurs with long necks and tails that lived from the Upper Jurassic to the Lower Cretaceous period, about 160100 million years ago.
The international team of researchers spent more than a week in early August collecting key parts of the huge skeleton, including vertebrae and ribs.
“It is not usual to find all the ribs of an animal like this, let alone in this position, maintaining its original anatomical position. This mode of preservation is relatively rare in the fossil record of dinosaurs, in particular sauropods, from the Portuguese Upper Jurassic,” Elisabete Malafaia, a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, said in the statement.
Malafaia told CBS News that the ribs measured nearly 10 feet long, making them “the largest sauropod ribs currently known in Europe and one of the largest described anywhere in the world.”
The recovered skeleton fragments will be cleaned and stabilized in a laboratory, documented and studied before being displayed in a museum, Malafaia told Newsweek.
Based on the preservation and positioning of the bones taken from the site, researchers suspect there may be more fossils buried in Pombal’s backyard, and plan to continue excavation work next year.