Lisbon - A Portuguese bulldozer driver has sparked controversy in his country by putting up a dinosaur fossil he found 10 years ago for sale on the Internet.
Gonsalo Ribeiro, who discovered the bones in western Portugal but would not reveal where exactly, decided it was time to earn some money from his treasure.
"For sale, dinosaur spine 90 percent intact," reads his advertisement, posted in the antiquities section of a website.
"I own an excavation business, and one day when we were out digging, we came across some stones. But when I took a closer look, I noticed they were not stones," said Ribeiro.
Ribeiro says that what he thought were stones are a "3,60-metre-long sauropod's tail".
The archaeological find was between 146 and 152-million years old and of "huge scientific value" according to paleontologist Octavio Mateus.
But Ribeiro has always refused to hand over his find to a museum, claiming "the figures they offer are far off the mark." He has already turned down an offer of €100 000.
An outraged Mateus, who works at a museum specialising in the Jurassic period in central-west Portugal, published a note on the website denouncing the: "sale of our heritage as if it were a car or a pair of shoes."
Mateus is calling for his government to introduce a law, like those of Argentina, China and Mongolia, making it illegal to sell on "public heritage".
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