New discoveries reignite excitement around Brazil’s dinosaurs

In 2009, during excavations outside the small countryside São Paulo city of Marília, paleontologist Willian Nava came across an 80 centimeter-long scapula belonging to a titanosaur — a group of some of the last-surviving long-necked sauropod dinosaurs.

Fossil studies concluded that the dinosaur lived in São Paulo some 70 million years ago, and Marília soon became a permanent excavation site, uncovering new pieces of this massive dinosaur in the years that followed.

Now, the University of Brasília is home to over 50 bones, making up 70 percent of the Marília titanosaur’s skeleton. The small town is now an obligatory visit for paleontology enthusiasts around Brazil and the rest of the world.

Last month, scientists came across new titanosaur fossils during construction work on a local highway. One of the bones, likely to be a femur, was uncovered on September 24, five meters underground. Just four months previous, another femur was found less than 40 kilometers away, between Marília and the neighboring town of Júlio Mesquita.

William Nava, the...