Enormous Dinosaur Rib Cage Has Been Exhumed From Someone’s Backyard

It’s a spine-tingling revelation, indeed. While conducting renovations at his home in Pombal, Portugal, in 2017, the owner of the property stumbled upon multiple fossilized bone fragments in his backyard.

Not sure what to make of them, the homeowner reached out to a research team at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon to dig deeper into the mysterious find.

Ever since then, Portuguese and Spanish paleontologists have uncovered various parts of a skeleton, including vertebrae and ribs, from the Monte Agudo yard. They believe these are the remains of a brachiosaurid sauropod.

Especially intriguing was how the rib cage was kept at its original anatomical position. “This mode of preservation is relatively uncommon in the fossil record of dinosaurs, in particular sauropods, from the Portuguese Upper Jurassic,” explains Elisabete Malafaia, postdoctoral researcher at the faculty, in a news release.

Sauropods were herbivores with distinguishably long necks and tails. Considering that this dinosaur is thought to have come from the Brachiosauridae group, it likely walked on this land somewhere between 160 to 100 million years ago.

The researchers estimate that the creature was 39 feet tall and 82 feet long, and that it could even be the “largest dinosaur to be found in Europe.”

The specimen is currently being assessed by an international team of researchers.

Interesting, it’s plausible that more dinosaur bones could turn up around this site. “The research in the Monte Agudo paleontological locality confirms that the region of Pombal has an important fossil record of Late Jurassic vertebrates,” adds Malafaia.

[via CNN and People, images via various sources]