Cristiano Dal Sasso – Wikipedia

Christian from the Sasso (Monza, 12 September 1965) is an Italian paleontologist.

He has been working since 1991 for the Civic Museum of Natural History of Milan. He was the technical coordinator of the excavations of Besano, who brought to light the complete skeleton of a triassic reptile of the Order of Itiosaurs, the Besanosaurus leptorhynchus , with embryos in the belly, published in 1996 together with Giovanni Pinna (at the time director of the museum). Subsequently he specialized in the study of Arcosauri reptiles, gaining notoriety also as a scientific popularizer.

He studied the first dinosaur found on Italian soil in Pietraroia (BN), and dating back to the Cretaceous: Scipionyx samniticus , whose description appeared in 1998 on Nature ^[first] , and in 2011 in a 300-page monograph, co-carved by another Italian paleontologist, Simone Maganuco. This small Teropode dinosaur, nicknamed “Ciro” in honor of its Campania origin, still represents a unicum in the fossil documentation for the exceptional conservation of the internal organs and for this reason has aroused great interest in the media all over the world. ^[2]

Cristiano Dal Sasso also described the first Lombard dinosaur, called informally “Saltriosauro”, the first Italian Sauropode dinosaur, nicknamed “Tito” because of his belonging to the titanosauria, and other new species of fossil reptiles, including Aphanizocnemus libanensis (a water lepidosaur of the Cretaceous of Lebanon) and Razanandrongobe Sakalavalae (a huge arcosauromorph of the Madagascar Cretaceous). More recently he created an international study group that in September 2014 published on Science ^[3] and on National Geographic the description of the neotype of Spinosauris aegyptiacus and the incredible adaptations to the semi-aquatic life of this huge predator dinosaur, which proved to be larger than Tyrannosaurus rex.

In 2018, together with Simone Maganuco and Andrea Cau he officially described the “Saltriosauro”, creating the taxon Saltatiovenator zanella . ^[4]

In 2003 his name was given to a kind of fossil of the average triassic, Eusaurosphargis dalsassoi , found in the Fossiliferous deposit of Besano ^[5] .

• Dal Sasso C. & Signore M., 1998 – Exceptional soft-tissue preservation in a theropod dinosaur from Italy. Nature, 392: 383-387.
• By Sasso C., Italian dinosaurs Marsilio, 2001.
• Dal Sasso, C., S. Maganuco, E. Buffetaut and M. A. Mendez, New information on the skull of the enigmatic theropod Spinosaurus, with remarks on its sizes and affinities (PDF), in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, vol. 25, nº 4, 2005, pp. 888-896.
• From Sasso C. & Maganuco S., 2011 – Scipionyx samniticus (Theropoda: Compensognathidae) from the Lower Cretaceous of Italy. Osteology, Ontogenetic Assessment, Phylogen, Soft Tissue Anatomy, Taphonomy and Palaoeobiology. Memoirs of the Italian Society of Natural Sciences and the Civic Museum of Natural History of Milan, Vol XXXVII, File I.
• Ibrahim N., Sereno P., Dal Sasso C., Maganuco S ,, Fabbri M., Marthri D. Zouhri, S., Myhrvold N. & Iurino D., Semiaquatic adaptations in a giant predatory dinosaur , in Science, vol. 345, nº 6204, 2014, pp. 1613–6
• Dal Sasso C., Pierangelini G., Famiani F., Cau A. & Nicosia U., 2016 – First sauropod bones from Italy offer new insights on the radiation of Titanosauria between Africa and Europe. Cretaceous Research, 64: 88-109.
• ( IN ) Cristiano Dal Sasso, Giovanni Pasini and Guillaume Fleury, Razanandrongobe sakalavae, a gigantic Mesoeucrocodylian from the Middle Jurassic of Madagascar, is the Oldest known Notosuchian , in Peeri , vol. 5, 4 July 2017, Doi: 10.7717/Peerj.3481 . URL consulted on 5 July 2017 .