The Italian island Sardinia is full of riches and breathtaking landscapes, but is also rich with history. A recent extraordinary scientific discovery is proof of this.
During the filming of a documentary on the region’s geomorphological landscape, scientists found important palaeontological evidence in the countryside around Baunei, in Ogliastra: fossil traces testifying to the presence of dinosaurs in Sardinia.
The discovery was made by a scientific team composed of professors Antonio Assorgia, Sergio Ginesu and Stefania Sias, former lecturers at the Universities of Sassari and Cagliari.
Preserved in rocks dating back to the Jurassic period, the footprints belong to a theropod dinosaur never previously reported in Sardinia.
Thanks to the extraordinary discovery, it has been possible to reconstruct the animal’s appearance and the environment in which it lived. The dinosaur was a biped from the Middle Jurassic period, around 165 million years ago, and lived along stretches of coastline with sandy and muddy sediments, typical of marshy and tidal areas. This was explained by experts at a press conference on Friday.
The rocky surface where the dinosaur’s footprints were found also provided evidence of the presence of other coeval species. This is therefore the first evidence of the presence of dinosaurs in the Mesozoic period in Sardinia.
Stefania Salis, the first to notice those tracks, said the dinosaur discovered was named ‘Bibi’, and would be a female specimen, although we have to wait for scientific evidence to ascertain this.
“The footprints speak to us and tell us how things were 165 million years ago, the one from Baunei was probably a herbivore, given the lack of claws, and was a biped about 120 160 centimetres long,” said palaeontologist and lecturer at the University of Sassari, Marco Zedda, speaking at the conference and explaining how from just a footprint, one can reconstruct the animal that left it.
According to Francesco Ginesu, Sole Director of the MGB company and responsible for the production of the documentary, this is an exceptional discovery, and emerged almost by chance. “As often happens in science, it has the power to radically change what we thought we knew,” said Ginesu, adding that “those footprints, spotted while working on a popularised product, turned out to be a finding of enormous scientific value. It is not just one more piece of data: it is direct evidence of the presence of dinosaurs in an area that until now had not yielded such clear evidence.”
