Man Finds Skeleton In His Backyard – Turns Out It's The Largest Dinosaur Ever Found in Europe (Video & Pictures)

Imagine waking up one fine day, only to realise that one of the most gigantic creatures to have walked the Earth once resided where you currently live — and we do not mean this metaphorically. In one such unprecedented turn of events, a man from Portugal’s Pombal, while carrying out some construction work in his backyard back in 2017, encountered fossilised bones of what looked like a humongous dinosaur!

Startled, the man immediately contacted palaeontologists from the University of Lisbon, after which the team began the excavation process. Now, about five years since the discovery, researchers believe that the remains belonged to a 39-foot-tall brachiosaurid sauropod — a herbivorous, long-necked quadrupedal dinosaur that dominated the world during the Late Jurassic Period about 160 to 100 million years ago. Some other species that belong to this group include Brachiosaurus altithorax from North America, Giraffatitan brancai from Africa, and the Lusotitan atalaiensis from Portugal's western region.