The fossilized remains were found in the town of Pompal in 2017 when a man spotted parts of the dinosaur while construction work was taking place on his property. Portuguese and Spanish paleontologists excavated the dinosaur in August and believe it is a sauropod, which were herbivorous, four-legged creatures that had long necks and tails. They lived during the Upper Jurassic period about 150 million years ago. Elisabete Malafaia, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Science, told Phys.org: “It is not common to find all the ribs of an animal like this, let alone in this position, preserving their original anatomical position.” “This mode of preservation is relatively unusual in fossil dinosaurs, particularly sauropods, from the Portuguese Upper Jurassic.” The skeleton was 39 feet high and 82 feet long. The remains are now being studied by an international research team. It comes just a month after researchers found the tracks of two sauropod dinosaurs dating back to around 100 million years ago in the outdoor courtyard of a restaurant in southwest China.
