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WHAT is Italy famous for? Food, yes; flash cars, for some; footballers and fab fashions鈥� but Italian dinosaurs? Italy was arguably the home of palaeontology more than 500 years ago, so it is surprising that its dinosaurs have not received too much publicity, and certainly high time the story of Dinosaurs of Italy is told.

All is revealed in this nice little book by Cristiano Dal Sasso of the Museum of Natural History in Milan. As a legitimate member of the small international community of dinosaur experts, Dal Sasso is well placed and qualified to tell the story of the dinosaurs of Italy and their discovery for the general reader.

Italy has a dozen or more important 鈥渄inosaur鈥� sites, representing times from the mid-Triassic (235 million years ago) to the late Cretaceous (85 million). The site at Gubbio records their extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. The sites range from traces such as footprints to fossilised bones of flying reptiles. Some really beautiful fossils of ancient reptiles have been found, many of them in recent years. One such was the half-metre Scipionyx, a hatchling theropod from Campania that was discovered in 1981 complete with some petrified muscles and its gut.

Most of the Mammals from the Age of Dinosaurs would, by comparison, have been singularly unimpressive. Small rodent-sized creatures, they of course played an extraordinary and critical role in our evolution. Much of their fossil record consists of teeth and jawbones; skeletons are rare.

But recent decades have seen remarkable growth in our understanding of our most ancient mammalian ancestors and relatives. Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska, professor emeritus at the Institute of Paleobiology in Warsaw, Poland, and her co-authors review their origins, evolution and structure in technical detail, providing an essential compilation for any student of early mammals.