Jacopo Conti

TThe one-day field trip to the Lavini di Marco tracksite (Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, NE Italy) offers the opportunity to appreciate one of the most extensive and interesting European dinosaur tracksites. The ichnoassemblage, Hettangian in age, is constituted by numerous quadrupedal trackways, referred to medium-sized sauropodomorphs, and hundreds of tridactyl footprints, produced by small- to large-sized theropods. The itinerary, developed in six stops, will focus on the most significant occurrences of the tracksite, highlighting the theropod biodiversity revealed by numerous tridactyl tracks, such as ROLM 198, ROLM 137 and ROLM 219, and the most spectacular and relevant quadrupedal trackways, such as ROLM 26, known as the "rock-climbing dinosaur" trackway, and ROLM 577, holotype of the ichnospecies .

The Pirro Nord quarry has yielded evidence of one of the earliest hominin presences in western Europe, accompanied by an extremely rich and diverse collection of vertebrate remains, including amphibians, reptiles, birds, and small and large mammals. The different Early Pleistocene sites of Pirro Nord are considered biochronologically homogeneous and indeed characterise the Pirro Nord Faunal Unit, customarily considered ~1.6–1.3 Ma, although younger numerical ages, clustering at ~0.8 Ma, have been obtained by a recent study. Recently, material recovered during the earliest fieldwork campaigns at Pirro Nord (1969–1971) has been rediscovered in Bari, and it is currently under examination. During this revision, we identified the presence of Crocuta , a hyena that spread in Europe ~0.8 Ma, from a site labelled Pirro III, which may therefore be dated to the latest Early Pleistocene or may be even younger. This finding does not imply that the rest of the fauna of Pirro Nord is younger than previously thought, but it confirms that younger deposits were present.

An updated description and revision of a left hemimandible assigned to Hyaenictitherium namaquensis, a dog-like hyaena from the late Miocene locality of As Sahabi (Libya, North Africa), is here provided. This fossil is part of the historical collection discovered by Carlo Petrocchi, the Italian researcher who excavated the site in the 1930s. The As Sahabi Hyaenictitherium represents the northernmost occurrence of H. namaquensis in Africa and one of the most informative evidence of this species known to date. The hemimandible has been digitised using photogrammetric techniques, morphological and biometric analyses have been carried out taking into account the African record of Hyaenictitherium.

The Romanelli Cave in south-east Italy is an important reference point for the so-called ‘Mediterranean province’ of European Upper Palaeolithic art. Yet, the site has only recently been subject to a systematic investigation of its parietal and portable art. Starting in 2016, a project has recorded the cave's interior, discovering new parietal art. Here, the authors report on a selection of panels, featuring animal figures, geometric motifs and other marks, identifying the use of different types of tools and techniques, along with several activity phases. These panels are discussed with reference to radiocarbon dating of nearby deposits, posing questions about chronology, technology and wider connections between Upper Palaeolithic cave sites across western Eurasia.

Suidae remains recovered from the late Pliocene site of Collepardo (Latium, central Italy) are described and assigned to Sus arvernensis, a small-sized Ruscinian to Early Villafranchian (MN14-MN16a) species. In Italy, S. arvernensis only occurs in the Triversa Faunal Unit (MN16a), supporting the recently revised chronology of Collepardo. CT-scan methods are used to virtually extract and analyse a newly discovered neurocranium, providing the content for the first inner cranial description carried out on an extinct Suidae. Our analysis reveals that S. arvernensis has an anteroposteriorly elongated and dorsoventrally flat cerebrum, similar to that of the Asian Babyrousa babyrussa and the African Hylochoerus meinertzhageni. These species substantially differ in size and are representatives of two widely diverging phylogenetic clades, excluding relatively simple evolutionary or allometric explanations for brain morphology in Suidae.

Several digital technologies are nowadays developed and applied to the study of the human fossil record. Here, we present a low-cost hardware implementation of the digital acquisition via photogrammetry, applied to a specimen of paleoanthropological interest: the Neanderthal skull Saccopastore 1. Such implementation has the purpose to semi-automatize the procedures of digital acquisition, by the introduction of an automatically rotating platform users can easily build on their own with minimum costs. We provide all the technical specifications, mostly based on the Arduino UNO™ microcontroller technology, and evaluate the performance and the resolution of the acquisition by comparing it with the CT-scan of the same specimen through the calculation of their shape differences. In our opinion, the replication of the automatic rotating platform, described in this work, may contribute to the improvement of the digital acquisition processes and may represent, in addition, a useful and affordable tool for both research and dissemination.