Palaeontologists Find a 70 Percent Intact Dinosaur Skeleton

Perhaps the dinosaurs would have been around even today if the Chicxulub impactor never wiped them all out 66 million years ago. While in a parallel universe, we might be friends with some of those huge creatures, palaeontologists still have to find remnants of them in our current reality to understand more about the beasts that had been roaming the Earth for about 165 million years.

TimesNowNews.com writes about the incredible case of a nearly complete dinosaur skeleton that was found in the city of Lufeng, the province of Yunnan from southwest China. More precisely, the researchers unearthed a fossil of a Lufengosaurus from the Jurassic period.

A 180-million-year old fossil

The dinosaur in question likely measured about 8 meters in length. Wang Tao, who is Head of the Dinosaur Fossil Conservation and Research Center of Lufeng City, said:

Such a highly complete dinosaur fossil is a rare find around the world. Based on the fossil that was have discovered over the years, on its tail, and thigh bones, we believe this is a type of giant Lufengosaurus, which lived during the Early Jurassic period.

Lufengosaurus is a rather small early sauropodomorph that usually measures about 20 feet long. Gregory S. Paul estimated that the weight of such a creature is about 1.7 metric tons. The neck of a lufengosaur is long, and the forelimbs are unexpectedly short.

Sauropodomorpha is an extinct group of long-necked and herbivorous dinosaurs that includes the sauropods, as well as their ancestral relatives. Sauropods were able to grow to very large sizes; they had long necks and tails and became the largest creatures to ever walk the Earth.

After the incredible discovery, staff with the Dinosaur Fossil Conservation and Research Center started to carry out excavations for preventing damage to the skeleton.