Product Description
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Sauropod fossil dinosaur bones from the Saharan deposits of North Africa are extremely rare. While there have been scientific papers published on specimens found, the material is scarce and much has yet to be learned because of it. We cut our teeth on North African fossils decades ago and in all our experience over the last 20 years, seeing what is dug and found in the region, we have never seen associated complete sauropod fossil bones ever offered for sale or found like these. This is a complete leg ALL FROM THE SAME DINOSAUR AND FOUND TOGETHER of a Diplodocoid sauropod dinosaur. There is a femur, a tibia and a fibula bone. The toe bone elements were probably also originally in field with these bones but it takes a trained eye to differentiate such bones from ordinary stones so they were mostly likely overlooked by whoever originally collected these. While we considered making a welded steel armature to mount the bones as they would be when the dinosaur was alive, whoever purchases these may prefer to have them displayed in a different manner so we opted to keep the cost down and leave that up to the buyer. We can recommend a company that can do the welding, if such a mount is desired. This is the only time we have ever had such rare fossils bones and it's a FIRST TIME we know of associated dinosaur bones being found and made available for private purchase, from the North Sahara Cretaceous deposits.
We acquired the unprepared bones as they were originally found, from a French collector who acquired them perhaps, over 25 years ago. We then fully prepared all three bones in our lab. Because we performed all the work ourselves, we can say with 100% certainty, what and how much work was performed with regard to repair and restoration. The tibia and fibula were found complete, in large sections. They required minimal crack filling with most pieces fitting together quite well. The femur had some portions missing in the middle but most of the pieces were there, requiring only 5-7% reconstruction of pieces too destroyed to use in the reassembly of the bone. The femur was likely more exposed with the tibia and fibula exposed for a lesser duration as there is some erosion loss to the femur which we opted to not reconstruct to retain as much of the natural integrity of the bone. The blue-gray and plum colors are stunning and much of the detailed bone surface is impeccably intact.
An exhaustive search of fossil dinosaur bones from North Africa will yield little positive results with much of it fragmentary or being of crocodile in origin, wrongly attributed to "dinosaur". The anatomy of this dinosaur fossil leg set compares extremely favorably with already published diplodocoid types found in the same region as this specimen was collected. This dinosaur fossil leg is IMMEASURABLY MORE RARE than any bones from North America. Associated major dinosaur limb bones (all from the same dinosaur), are a ONCE IN A LIFETIME find in North Africa deposits, if not of any world deposit.
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