While we wait for Sardinia to contribute, and all the right conditions are there, Italian paleontology is holding on to the (few) bones and (many) tracks of dinosaurs discovered over the last fifty years. A review of recent discoveries and an analysis of future prospects was made possible by a lecture by Professor Cristiano Dal Sasso of the Natural History Museum of Milan, hosted by the Martel Paleontological Museum of the Grande Mine of Serbariu, in Carbonia, entitled "Italian Dinosaurs."
And Italy has its say on this matter, with finds from the Triassic to the Jurassic, up to the Cretaceous, that is, a period spanning 200 million to 90 million years ago. Numerous traces have been found, spanning from north to south, from the Alps to the Ionian Sea. When it comes to fossils, bones, then the numbers are essentially limited. In the 1980s, "Ciro" was found near Benevento, a 23-centimeter-long baby Scipionis Sanniticus, a chick that hatched from an egg in the lagoon and remained fossilized in the fine sand: as an adult, it may have reached two meters. Then came the carnivorous Saltriovenator, between Italy and Switzerland, an 8-meter-long predator, a 200-million-year-old bipedal ceratosaurus. Thus, Tito, the first and only case of a herbivorous Titanosaur with an extremely long neck (a brontosaurus-type), found near Rocca di Cave, in Lazio. Finally, a dozen skeletons near Trieste, in a fishing village, representing the ancestors of the vegetarian duck-billed dinosaurs. The largest, measuring 3-4 meters, has been nicknamed Antonio.
And what about Sardinia? "With the hypothetical presence of footprints," Dal Sasso analyzes, "we need to be careful because nature can play nasty tricks. Currently, there's no evidence of footprints or fossils, but Sardinia has an advantage: it was already dry land when millions of years ago it was attached to the mainland on the Spanish and French sides. That means there are Jurassic and Triassic deposits on the island, too. So, the study methodology, which Sardinia excels at, just needs luck."
