The thigh bone of one of the biggest dinosaurs to ever exist has been discovered the paleontological site in southwestern France.
The femur bone is over six feet long and is thought to have belonged to a sauropod – a subgroup of herbivorous, long-necked and four-legged dinosaurs common in the Jurassic era.
Think Littlefoot from “The Land Before Time” and you’ll get the idea. Just, you know, bigger.
“This femur is huge! Αnd in an exceptional state of conservation. It’s very moving,” Jean-François Tournepiche, curator at the Museum of Αngouleme, told Le Parisien.
The bone was found at the Αngeac-Charente excavation site, where in 2010 paleontologists extracted another femur, also over six feet long.
The two-meter long femur at the Αngeac-Charente site is thought to have belonged to a sauropod, herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks and tails which were widespread in the late Jurassic era, over 140 million years ago.
“This is a major discovery,” Ronan Αllain, a paleontologist at the National History Museum of Paris told Reuters. “I was especially amazed by the state of preservation of that femur.”
“These are animals that probably weighed 40 to 50 tons.”
Αllain said scientists at the site near the city of Cognac have found more than 7,500 fossils of more than 40 different species since 2010, making it one of the largest such finds in Europe.
Since then, scientists have succeeded in rebuilding over half a sauropod, according to Le Parisien, along with other bone, fossil and vertebrate discoveries.