Scipionyx was discovered in the spring of 1981 by Giovanni Todesco, an amateur paleontologist, in the small Le Cavere quarry at the edge of the village of Pietraroja, approximately seventy kilometers northeast of Naples.

He prepared the strange discovery in the basement of his house in San Giovanni Ilarione near Verona, removing, without the use of any optical instrument, part of the chalk matrix from the top of the bones and covering them with vinyl glue.

[6] The popular magazine Oggi simultaneously nicknamed the animal Ciro, a typical Neapolitan boy's name, an idea by chief-editor Pino Aprile.

Meanwhile, in Salerno, Sergio Rampinelli had begun a further preparation of the fossil, during three hundred hours of work removing the fake tail, replacing the vinyl glue with a modern resin preservative and finishing the uncovering of the bones.

In 1998, Ciro because of this made the front cover of Nature, when the type species Scipionyx samniticus was named and described by Marco Signore and Cristiano Dal Sasso.

The holotype, SBA-SA 163760, dates from the early Albian, about 110 million years old, and consists of an almost complete skeleton of a juvenile individual, lacking only the end of the tail, the lower legs and the claw of the right second finger.

[11] In view of the exceptional importance of the find, between December 2005 and October 2008 the fossil was intensively studied in Milan resulting in a monograph by dal Sasso and Simone Maganuco published in 2011,[2] containing the most extensive description of a single dinosaur species ever.

Where the parietal and the frontal bone make contact, the depression in which the supratemporal fenestra, a skull roof opening, was present, shows a sinuous ridge on the postorbital.

Between the frontals and the parietals the skull roof over a limited distance has not closed yet, resulting in a conspicuous diamond-shaped opening, a fontanelle that was first mistaken for damage inflicted on the fossil during the first preparation.

In the 1998 description a part of the splenial was mistaken for a supradentarium and the angular was misidentified as the surangular because in the fossil it had been displaced upwards, creating the false impression an external mandibular fenestra, an opening in the outer side of the jaw, would be present.

The third, fourth and fifth vertebrae also show pneumatopores but the consecutive series lacks them, which is surprising as it had been assumed the pneumatisation process would have started at the back, working itself forward.

In 1998 interpreted as a reduced hyposphene-hypantrum complex, a system of secondary vertebral joints shown by many theropods, it was by the 2011 study seen as a pair of attachment points for tendons, as identified in 2006 in Compsognathus.

The gastralia form a herringbone pattern, the left and right medial elements overlapping each other at their forked ends in order that the basket can expand and contract to accommodate the breathing movements of the abdomen.

The back end is rectangular, the front edge has an appending hook-shaped point and near its top a circular notch, a trait that is usually considered a synapomorphy of the Tyrannosauroidea.

[2] The soft tissues are not present in the form of imprints but as three-dimensional petrifications, having been replaced by calcium phosphate in amazing detail, even to the subcellular level; or as transformed remains of the original biomolecular components.

The sole element still present consists of a seven millimetre long piece of the trachea of which about ten tracheal rings are visible, the most anterior of which are open at the top, giving them a C-shape.

The trachea is quite thin, with a preserved width of one millimetre about half as wide as would be expected for an animal the size of the holotype, and positioned rather low in the neck base, embedded in connective tissue.

That the red pigment was indeed derived from blood, was confirmed in 2011: a scanning electron microscope analysis indicated that the substance consisted of limonite, hydrated iron oxide, a likely transformation product of the original haemoglobin.

These have a darker colouration on top than on the bottom which suggests that the original horn material is still present — but this has not yet been directly tested by a chemical analysis for fear of damaging these delicate structures that were seen as forming an essential part of the integrity of the precious specimen.

In his study, Cau proposes a new procedure to classify these animals, applying it to Juravenator, Scipionyx and Sciurumimus, obtaining a possible phylogenetic position that was not affected by the immaturity of the specimens.

Tanycolagreus Stokesosaurus Juratyrant Eutyrannosauria The location where Scipionyx was found, in the Albian was part of the Apulian Plate, at the time largely covered by the shallow Paratethys.

[2] However, there are also indications that the terranes regularly interconnected to form far more extensive islands, land bridges allowing a dispersal of much larger animals, such as sauropods and large theropods.

Nevertheless, Dal Sasso & Maganuco did not consider Scipionyx to have been a permanent resident of small islands throughout tens of millions of years, but more likely a recent immigrant arriving during a dispersal wave, probably from North-Africa.

They admitted this was at odds with their own phylogenetic analysis, showing Scipionyx to be a basal compsognathid, but they pointed out that the phylogeny found was uncertain due to the juvenile status of the fossil.

That swift lizards had been caught and sea fish washed ashore had been gathered necessitating a prolonged patrolling of the flood line, both indicate a good mobility.

[4][16] Parts of the windpipe, intestines,[3] liver,[3] blood vessels, cartilage, horn sheaths, tendons and muscles[3] were fossilised in the fine limestone in a way unlike any dinosaur fossil previously discovered.

According to Dal Sasso & Maganuco the hatchling would certainly have been incapable of achieving this and they considered it a strong indication of parental care as it was improbable the animal had by chance encountered a carcass neatly ripped apart into easily swallowed bits by predators or scavengers.

inferred that Scipionyx had a respiratory system different from birds, and more similar to crocodiles, based on an analysis of pictures of the fossil which seemed to indicate the presence of a diaphragm.

[18] The 2011 study concluded that due to the fact that the liver had been preserved as a vague halo, representing body fluids that after death might have covered a larger surface than the organs they originated from, its exact dimensions and extent cannot be determined.

The presumed M. diaphragmaticus was shown to be an artifact caused by the polishing and engraving of calcite nodules of non-organic origin during preparation, creating the illusion of muscle fibres.