One of the most important geo-palaeontological findings, the fossil of a young dinosaur, the first to be discovered in Italy, revolutionised the reconstruction of the country’s palaeogeography, and it is part of the Pietraroja area. The story of Ciro – a typical Neapolitan boy’s name, given to it by the media because it was discovered in the region of Campania – began about 110 million years ago during the Lower Cretaceous epoch. Discovered in 1981 by Giovanni Todesco, after a series of vicissitudes Ciro was presented to the international community through studies by Cristiano Lorenzo Dal Sasso and Marco Signore published in the scientific magazine “Nature”. Considering the rarity of the data, this is considered as an exceptional discovery: the skeleton is almost complete, and for the first time, there are the remains of many soft tissues, including traces of the internal organs, opening up new views revealing the dinosaurs’ biology and evolution. “Ciro offers proof that, during the age of the dinosaurs, Italy was not entirely covered by the sea as has often been believed, but there were also extensive areas of dry land” (Focus). Across the world, over 2,500 magazines dedicated their front covers to this discovery. Now kept at the premises of the Superintendency of Archaeology in Benevento, Ciro has also been exhibited at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo.
