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SPAIN - Europe can now lay claim to its own massive dinosaur with the discovery of a 150-million-year-old fossil of a giant leaf-eating creature which grew up to 36m long.
Scientists have discovered dozens of fossilised bones of the sauropod dinosaur at a site called Barrihonda-El Humero near the village of Riodeva in Teruel, Spain.
Fully grown, Turiasaurus riodevensis would have weighed between 40 and 48 tonnes - the combined weight of six or seven adult male elephants. Its size puts Turiasaurus on a par with some of the largest dinosaurs in the world, whose remains have been found in Africa and America but never before in Europe.
Brook Hanson of the journal Science, which published details of the discovery, said that the claw of the first digit on the dinosaur's foot was the size of an American football.
- INDEPENDENT
