Brazil’s biggest dinosaur discovered after being stashed in a cupboard for 60 years
Money was an issue holding back research, as well as a lack of people up to the task
Brazil just found its biggest ever dinosaur – in a storage cupboard. In its prime, more than 66 million years ago, this long necked herbivore was 25 metres long – longer than an articulated bus – and could chomp through trees at a terrifying rate.
By the time the creature was found by renowned Brazilian palaeontologist Llewellyn Ivor Price in 1953, only a few hefty, fossilised bits of the spine remained.
Researchers knew immediately they’d stumbled on something big. They didn’t have the staff or resources to figure out how big, however, so the dinosaur pieces languished the next six decades in storage at Rio’s ornate Museum of Earth Sciences. Until now.
We were waiting for the staff ... for a laboratory that started from nothing to mature
The remains of what has been named Austroposeidon magnificus, and pronounced Brazil’s biggest dinosaur, went on general public view for the first time on Thursday.
A nearly complete spinal vertebra – about the size of a microwave oven and entirely petrified – and numerous fragments of other vertebrae lie on a black cloth in an upper room of the museum.
Nearby hangs an enormous artist’s rendition, done to scale, of what Austroposeidon magnificus might have looked like: a small head, long neck, enormous body and long tail. A patch of the reptile’s skin is shown pulled back to reveal where the prize vertebra would have slotted in.
Museum director Diogenes de Almeida Campos said six decades does sound on the slow side for studying such a big find.
“A friend said to me just yesterday, ‘Diogones, what, it took you 60 years?’,” he recalled with a wry smile. “It sounds a bit ridiculous to say this.”