IN what is being hailed as a “major discovery,” paleontologists found a thigh bone of a massive dinosaur last week at an excavation site in southwestern France.

The 140-million-year-old dinosaur bone, measuring 6.5 feet (1.98 meters) in length and weighing 1,100 pounds (498 kilograms), was unearthed at Angeac-Charente, a site that has been yielding fossils since 2010, Reuters reported.

The bone was found in a thick layer of clay.

The femur found is believed to have belonged to a sauropod, a plant-eating dinosaur with a long neck and tail, which was widespread in the late Jurassic era.

Sauropods are some of the largest land animals that ever existed.

Aside from the size, paleontologists were also especially amazed by the state of preservation of the femur.

“We can see the insertions of muscles and tendons, and scars,” Ronan Allain, a paleontologist at the National History Museum of Paris, told Le Parisien newspaper. “This is rare for big pieces, which tend to collapse in on themselves and fragment.”

The dinosaurs would have weighed 40 to 50 tons, Allain said.

Paleontologists have found more than 7,500 fossils of different species at Angeac-Charente since 2010, according to Allain, making it one of the largest such finds in Europe.(SD-Agencies)