Cristiano Dal Sasso

Summary

Cristiano Dal Sasso (born 12 September 1965) is an Italian paleontologist.

Cristiano Dal Sasso
Born (1965-09-12) September 12, 1965 (age 58)
Alma materUniversity of Milano-Bicocca
Occupation(s)Scientific popularizer
Paleontologist

Biography edit

He was born in Monza, Italy and has been working since 1991 for the Milan Natural History Museum where he is the curator of fossil reptiles and birds. He was the technical coordinator of the excavations of Besano, which brought to light the complete skeleton of a Middle Triassic marine reptile of the order of Ichthyosaurs, the Besanosaurus with embryos in the belly, published in 1996 along with Giovanni Pinna.[1]

He studied Scipionyx, the first dinosaur found in Italy at Pietraroja, whose description appeared in Nature in 1998.[2] This small theropod dinosaur, nicknamed "Ciro", generated much publicity because of the unique preservation of large areas of petrified soft tissue and internal organs such as muscles and intestines. The fossil shows many details of these, even the internal structure of some muscle and bone cells.

Cristiano Dal Sasso also described Saltriovenator, considered as the earliest known Ceratosauria and largest Early Jurassic theropod, discovered in 1996 in a quarry in Saltrio, in northern Italy.

Bibliography edit

  • Dal Sasso, Cristiano (2004). Dinosaurs of Italy. Vol. 81 (Life of the Past ed.). Indiana University Press. p. 387. doi:10.1086/511544. ISBN 978-0253345141. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)

References edit

  1. ^ Dal Sasso, Cristiano; Pinna, Giovanni (January 1996). Besanosaurus leptorhynchus n. gen. n. sp., a new shastasaurid ichthyosaur from the Middle Triassic of Besano (Lombardy, N. Italy) (Paleontologia Lombarda, Nuova Serie, Volume IV ed.). Società Italiana di Scienze Naturali & Museo Civico di Storia Naturale, Milano.
  2. ^ Dal Sasso, Cristiano; Signore, Marco (26 March 1998). "Exceptional soft-tissue preservation in a theropod dinosaur from Italy" (PDF). Nature. 392 (6674). Nature (Vol. 392): 383–387. Bibcode:1998Natur.392..383D. doi:10.1038/32884. S2CID 4325093.