40 years of field work in the Triassic marine vertebrate sites

Abstract

During the first 70 years of the XX century very few researches have concerned the marine Triassic fishes. They were prevalently related to the many scientific expeditions carried out in the first half of that century in localities situated along the Pangea margins during the Early Triassic: Greenland, Canada, Spitzbergen, Madagascar. My story starts when, still undergraduate, in 1975 I joined Prof. Maurizo Gaetani on a mapping trip in the Belluno Dolomites: there I found my first fossil remain of a Triassic fish. Since then, excavations and field works have followed one another, almost always concerning new fossil- bearing levels, going back very recently to the same spot in Dolomites, Last September, 41 years after my first discovery of a Triassic fossil fish, I had the opportunity of a new survey on Monte Civetta where I found much more than I expected.

Keywords

• triassic
• tethys
• lagerstätten
• fossil fish
• marine vertebrates