Scipionyx
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 Scipionyx samniticus fossil at the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale, in Milan, Italy.
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Extinct (fossil)
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| Scipionyx samniticus dal Sasso & Signore, 1998 |
Scipionyx was a very small theropod dinosaur from Early Cretaceous Italy. There has been only one skeleton discovered, which is notable for the preservation of soft tissue and internal organs. It is the fossil of a juvenile only a few inches long. Adult size is estimated to be 2 metres (approx. 6 feet). The name Scipionyx comes from the Latin word Scipio and the Greek onyx, meaning "Scipio's claw", and for Scipione Breislak,[1] the geologist who wrote the first description of the formation in which the fossil was found. The specific name samniticus means "From the Samnium", the Latin name of the region around Pietraroja. The specimen is also popularly nicknamed "Skippy".[2]
It was discovered in the spring of 1981 by Giovanni Todesco, a fossil amateur, near Pietraroja.[2] Unaware of the importance of his findings, he kept the strange fossil in the basement of his house until 1992 when he met two paleontologists from the Natural History Museum of Milan, Cristiano dal Sasso and Marco Signore,[2] who identified it as the first Italian dinosaur. The magazine Oggi gave the tiny dinosaur the nickname Ciro, a typical Neapolitan name. In 1998, Scipionyx made the front cover of Nature.[3] It is considered one of the most important fossil vertebrates ever discovered, after a long and painstaking "autopsy" revealed the unique fossilisation of its internal organs.
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