The thigh bone fossil was uncovered in the Las Hoyas formation in central Spain's Cuenca province, scientists report.
Credit: AFP
The bone is believed to belong to a giant long-necked dinosaur weighing more than 40 tonnes and measuring 30 metres, the Turiasaurus Riodevensis.
Credit: Carin L. Cain / AAAS / Science
MADRID: A 30-metre-long dinosaur that lived 145 million years ago in what is today Spain has claimed the record for longest thigh bone ever uncovered in Europe, palaeontologists said.
The Dinopolis Foundation, a dinosaur research institute, said the 1.92-metre bone was found earlier this year at a site at Riodeva near Teruel in eastern Spain along with a 1.25-metre tibia and 15 vertebrae.
The bone is believed to belong to a giant long-necked dinosaur weighing more than 40 tonnes and measuring 30 metres, the Turiasaurus Riodevensis, first discovered in 2004 at the same site, it said in a statement.
Spain the place for new dino discoveries
The new fossils, in addition to those gathered in 2004, should allow the foundation to construct a skeleton of the animal, which lived some 145 million years ago, Dinopolis said.
The announcement comes two weeks after palaeontologists revealed the discovery in the same region of a new type of dinosaur with a hump that they believe is the forerunner of flesh-eating leviathans which once ruled the planet.
The fossil was uncovered in the Las Hoyas formation in central Spain's Cuenca province, a treasure trove of finds that date to the Lower Cretaceous period of between 120 and 150 million years ago.
