Pronunciation: teth-eez-HAD-ros
Meaning: Tethys hadrosaurid
Author/s: Dalla Vecchia (2009)
Synonyms: None known
First Discovery: Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy
Discovery Chart Position: #669
Tethyshadros insularis
Affectionately known as "Antonio" and discussed in the literature for as long as ten years before a formal description was released, Tethyshadros is one of the most complete and beautifully preserved dinosaurs ever found. In fact, only one other is more impressive: Scipionyx, which also preserved fossilized internal organs, and funnily enough, these two represent the entire record of currently valid Italian dinosaur species (as of 2009) between them. Through necessity, Antonio was chopped into six pieces for ease of transportation, and some of those were pared down to lighten the load further. But none of that affected the finished article much, and once cleaned and stuck back together, it showed, for the first time, the whole body morphology of a hadrosauroid dinosaur, and pretty much everything about it is unusual.
(Tethys hadrosauroid of the Island)Etymology
Tethyshadros is derived from "Tethys" (the ancient ocean, of which the modern Mediterranean is one of the last remains) and "hadros" (for Hadrosauroidea, the family to which it belongs).
The species epithet, insularis, means "of the island" in Latin, a reference to its place of discovery which, during the Late Cretaceous, was part of the Adriatic-Dinaric Island; one of the larger islands of the European Archipelago.
Discovery
The remains of Tethyshadros were discovered at Villaggio del Pescatore in the Liburnian Formation, Trieste, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy, in 1994.
The holotype (SC 57021) is a mostly complete but crushed skeleton.
In 2015, the Italian government awarded Mario Sartori, landowner of the site where Tethyshadros was found, a quarter-fossil-value "prize for discovery", which equates to a tidy €500,000. And this is the case for every fossil found in Italy, where they are all formally State property. However, if it seems likely that the Tethyshadros site contains more goodies, the government may weasel out of further payments by declaring it an area of public interest and exercise expatriation: a bully-boy tactic of acquiring said land, with its value (decided by government, of course) paid to the owner, whether they want to sell it or not. We don't know how values are arrived at, but we're willing to bet that if Tethyshadros were found in a two-acre corn field Sartori would get the going rate for a two-acre cornfield, rather than a two-acre site potentially containing tens of millions of Euros worth of fossils. Plus, the former owner gets paid squat if further discoveries are made there. Anything is better than nothing, though.
