ItalyUpdate

Italian researchers have announced the identification of a cache of fossilized bones discovered at Saltrio, near Varese (Lombardia) in 1996 by an amateur paleontologist, Angelo Zanella. Tests have confirmed that they belong to a ceratosauro that lived some two hundred million years ago.

When it was alive, the creature was almost 8 metres long and weighed over a ton. A ferocious hunter of the early Jurassic period, it is the first example of a Jurassic era dinosaur found in Italy and is also hailed as the oldest example of a large meat-eating predator of this kind in the world.

It has been listed as Saltriovenator zanellai (Saltrio hunter – after the place where it was found and Zanellai in honour of its finder.

Info: www.livescience.com