From trying to understand how the structure of the universe has changed, we now turn to look at how the structure of the land has changed over time. Our world’s continents have always been on the move, and volcanic lands have risen up out of the sea only to be worn away with time and sunk back into the water. We can see how the crust once fit together by looking at how fossils match on lands that no longer touch. Understanding the more islandy bits has been more of a challenge.

But sometimes you get lucky.

The boot of Italy is a seismically active region rife with volcanoes. If you want to go searching for old human relics but not truly ancient relics, Italy is a good place to go. If you want dinosaur bones, then Montana. You want to go to Montana or China or other continental landscapes. 

It was thought that during the age of the dinosaurs, modern Italy was nothing more than a series of islands incapable of supporting large dinosaurs, but it turns out we were wrong.

During a dig in the Villaggio del Pescatore site, University of Bologna researchers found multiple skeletons of the Tethyshadros insularis dinosaur as well as fossil remains of fish, crocodiles, flying reptiles, and crustaceans. These discoveries indicate that eighty million years ago, that land that became Italy was not only small islands that characterized the ancient Mediterranean, but many migratory routes for large terrestrial animals like the dinosaurs might have been possible across land bridges of what we now call Italy.

More Information

A dinosaur trove in Italy rewrites the history, geography, and evolution of the ancient Mediterranean area (EurekAlert)

“An Italian dinosaur Lagerstätte reveals the tempo and mode of hadrosauriform body size evolution,” Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza et al., 2021 December 2, Scientific Reports