This is Scientific Americans, 60-Second Science, I'm Emily Schwing.

When he was little, Alessandro Kiranza's grandmother used to read him bedtime stories

about dinosaurs, and she would always tell him the same thing.

Oh, you know, but these things were not living here, they were living in America and in Asia,

so not here in Italy.

That bedtime story first began to change for Italian kids back in the 1990s.

So we've found plenty of dinosaur records down from dinosaur fossils.

We started in the past decades to recover footprints, but then, most importantly, we started

finding bones and now complete skeletons of dinosaurs.

Kiranza, a paleontologist at the University of Vigo in Spain, is part of a team that

recently uncovered nearly a dozen complete dinosaur skeletons, a first in Italy.

The discovery is documented in the journal Scientific Reports, and it once again upends

the bedtime story, so to speak.

Usually you don't find multiple complete individuals all together and it's something

historically very rare.

Back in 1994 in Trieste, a municipality in northeastern Italy, scientists discovered

Antonio, a small hadrosaur or duck-billed dinosaur.

The skeletons about three and a half meters long and very well preserved.

And one peculiar feature from this dinosaur was that it was relatively small from the

close cousins that were inhabiting at the time north of American Asia.

And dinosaurs from these exotic lands were quite big, they basically coexisting with the

T-Rex or relatives of T-Rex.

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