DINOSAURS!

Everybody knows dinosaurs! Those sluggish beasts of old that are somehow related to both birds and reptiles… or at least that’s what most people believe. You see, dinosaurs were fascinating fast moving and colourful animals that lived throughout the Mesozoic (Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous).

Although most of these animals lived long long ago, it was only in 1841 that the term dinosaur was coined, and as such before that date all the fossil findings had been attributed to magical beasts and gods. This is not to say that dinosaurs aren’t real animals, on the contrary, they’re a group of animals that split from other archosaurs in the Triassic period (234–233.23 million years ago). There are two “main kinds” of dinosaurs, namely ornithischians (bird hipped) and saurischian (lizard hipped), and these two categories can be divided into further sub-categories: Thyreopora, Ornithopoda, Marginocephalia, Sauropodomorpha and Theropoda, the group in which birds are.

Unfortunately, here in Italy we have found fossil remains of only three species of non–avian dinosaurs (non–bird dinosaurs). The first one is the Scipionyx, “Scipio’s claw”, which was a small theropod related to Compsognathus, whichwas discovered in 1981 and described in 1994. It lived near what is now Naples in the middle of the Cretaceous period.
The second one is the Saltrivenator, “the hunter of Saltrio”, which is thought to have been a large, bipedal carnivore similar to Ceratosaurus. It lived around the area of Saltri, near Milan, in the early Jurassic period.

Last, but not least, the Tethyshadros, “hadrosaur of the Tetid“, is an extinct species of hadrosaurid dinosaur that lived in the area of what is now Triest in the upper Cretaceous.
Probably all these dinosaurs had some kind of feathering, as this isn’t a bird specific trait, but rather the ancestral condition of all dinosaurs. And so there you go, an accurate depiction of a dinosaur!

I hope that after reading this article you feel more interested in dinosaurs, as I wrote it explicitly to get more people interested in them.