SCIPIONYX

For dozens of decades, the Italians had to sit by as even the poorest countries in Europe paraded their ground-breaking fossils. It wasn't until 1981 that they discovered their first dinosaur in a limestone bed just north of Naples, but what a beauty it was and unlike anything else from anywhere.

Being buried in the bed of an ancient lagoon (judging by the copious remains of nearby freshwater organisms, shrimps, fishes, and crocodilians) may be the reason for Scipionyx' fantastic state of preservation. Unfortunately, it was reburied for 12 years in the dusty cellar of Giovanni Todesco, a shoemaker and keen amateur fossil collector from Verona, but after a word from science reporter Franco Capone, who explained that Italian fossils are the property of their respective state, Tedesco personally delivered his prized possession to the superintendence at Naples in an overnight travel bag. Who wants Aurelio Zen breathing down their neck?

By 1993 Scipionyx was back in Salerno, the province with territorial responsibility for safeguarding fossils from the village of Pietratoia, and scientists were so utterly overwhelmed at its return that it took them a year to pick up a micro chisel or brush! After many months Scipionyx was eventually cleaned, and Sergio Rampinelli, the preparator, stood and stared slack-jawed as its internal plumbing revealed itself. Then a blast of ultraviolet light applied by Drs John A. Ruben and Willem J. Hillenius lit up its organs like a colour-coded engineering diagram.

Clearly visible are fossilized soft tissues, including its intestines, windpipe, muscles and what appears to be an exceptionally large liver attached, in part, to an "Hepatic piston diaphragm", which some experts claim pumped oxygen into its lungs in a manner more akin to crocodiles than birds. Throw in an ornithomimid-like pelvis, dromaeosaurid-like forelimbs, hands and skull elements, and troodontid-like neck vertebrae, and you have a critter that isn't easy to classify. It may be a maniraptoran, possibly a compsognathid, but it's missing the lower part of its hind legs, so we don't know if it had second digit "killing claws". And despite its pristine condition, it didn't have the "proto" feathers you might expect to find on a "hand snatcher".

Nicknamed "cagnolino" (little doggie) by Giovanni Todesco, "Ambrogio" (after the patron saint of Milan) by Giorgio Teruzzi, "Dromaeodaimon irene" in the 1995 thesis of Marco Signore, "Ciro" by the Italians, and "Skippy" by anyone who has problems with Italian, Scipionyx was just a hatchling with an oversized skull, huge eyes and a stubby, rounded snout. However, experts surmise that it wouldn't have been more than a meter and a half in length even after its cuteness was long gone.