A Portuguese man accidentally discovered the bones of what may be the largest dinosaur

ever found in Europe. While doing construction on his Pombal, Portugal, property in 2017, he

noticed fossilized bone fragments in his yard. The man contacted scientists, who began initial

excavations later that year. The effort to dig up this dinosaur has been ongoing, and this month,

Spanish and Portuguese paleontologists unearthed more of the gigantic remains.

So far, an “important set of elements of the axial skeleton” has been collected—including

vertebrae and 10-foot-long ribs, per a statement. “It's one of the biggest specimens discovered

in Europe, perhaps in the world,” Elisabete Malafaia, a paleontologist from the Faculty of Sciences

at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, tells Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The bones likely belonged to a sauropod, a type of plant-eating dinosaur with a

characteristically long neck and tail. This group of dinosaurs included the largest land creatures

ever to roam the Earth. Scientists estimate this specimen, which may belong to the

Brachiosauridae family, was about 39 feet tall and 82 feet long, per a statement, and lived about

160 to 100 million years ago, during the Upper Jurassic to the Lower Cretaceous.

The Pombal region in central Portugal, where the bones were found, “has an important fossil

record of Late Jurassic vertebrates,” Malafaia says in the statement, and it has allowed for

several “very significant” discoveries about the animals that lived there 145 million years ago.

Still, she says this find was rather unique. “It is not usual to find all the ribs of an animal like

this, let alone in this position, maintaining their original anatomical position,” Malafaia says in

the statement. “This kind of preservation is relatively rare for large-sized dinosaurs from the

Portuguese fossil record and indicates particular and unusual environmental and taphonomic

features,” she tells CBS News’ Christopher Brito.

The way that this specimen was preserved indicates that more of its bones could still be

uncovered, and the scientists plan to continue excavations next year, per CBS. In the meantime,

researchers are going to take the newly uncovered fossilized bones to a laboratory, where they

will remove sediments, document the finds, and prepare them for future study and display in a

museum. Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland who wasn’t

involved in the project, tells CNN’s Hafsa Khalil the find is “ gobsmacking — a dinosaur ribcage

sticking out of somebody’s garden… [It goes to show] you can potentially find them anywhere

there is rock of the right age and right type for preserving Jurassic-aged bones, whether it’s in

the badlands or someone’s backyard.”