Palaeontologists from Spain and Portugal working at the site in the town of Pombal believe it could be the remains of the largest sauropod dinosaur ever found in Europe. Sauropods are herbivorous, four-legged dinosaurs characterized by long necks and tails. The excavation began when the landowner first noticed bone fragments on his property in 2017 during construction work. Researchers say in recent weeks they discovered the vertebrae and ribs of a possible sauropod brachiosaurus, which would have been about 39 feet (12 meters) tall and about 25 meters long. The group Brachiosauridae consists of large species that lived from the Upper Jurassic period to the Lower Cretaceous, about 160 to 100 million years ago. “It is not common to find all the ribs of an animal like this, let alone in this position, preserving their original anatomical position,” said Elisabete Malafaia, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lisbon. “This mode of preservation is relatively unusual in dinosaur fossils, particularly sauropods, from the Portuguese Upper Jurassic.”
