The dwarf dinosaurs, members of the Sauropods family (the largest animals ever to treat the land) have body lengths ranging from 1.7 to 6.2 metres. They seemed so preposterously to the researchers that the team initially thought the specimens were juveniles.
But a closer look at the skulls and isolated bones showed that they were in fact dwarfed adults, of the four footed herbivorous Sauropod.
If it were alive today, it would stand shoulder- high to an adult human, and its young would be the size of a German Shepard dog.
University of Bonn palaeontologist Martin Sander and colleagues studied 11 specimens preserved in marine carbonate rock at a quarry near Goslar, Lower Saxony. The layers are in so-called Kimmeridgian rock of the Late Jurassic period, which makes them between 150 and 155 million years old.
The species has been named Europasaurus holgeri, or "Holger's reptile from Europe," in honour the first person to find the mones in 1998, Holger Luedtke.
Mr Sander says the dinosaur probably lived on one of the large islands around the Lower Saxony basin. "Such islands would not have been able to support large-bodied sauropods… the ancestor of the Europasaurus would have dwarfed rapidly on immigrating to the island, as a response to shrinking land masses caused by rising sea levels."