(ANSA) - Milan, December 19 - The oldest large predator dinosaur in the world was Italian, palaeontologists said Wednesday.
    The young ceratosaur that lived 200 million years ago, whose scientific name is Saltriovenator zanellai, roamed the plains of what is now Lombardy, they said.
    Almost eight metres long and weighing in at around a tonne, Saltriovenator had dagger-sharp teeth and steel-strong claws, they said.
    "He was a real war machine," said palaeontologists Cristiano Dal Sasso, Simone Maganuco and Andrea Cau, presenting the find at Milan's Palazzo Reale.
    The predator is the first Italian dinosaur of the Jurassic age and the only dinosaur found in Lombardy, the scientists said.
    Saltriovenator (meaning 'hunter from Saltrio', the place where he was found) is a new species that backdates by 25 million years the appearance of the great predator dinosaurs, the palaeontologists told reporters at the event.
    This two-legged hunting and ambush specialist lived between the tropical beaches and luxuriant forests that covered what was today's western Lombardy, the scientists who discovered him told reporters.
    His ID, published in the journal PeerJ, reveals a young exemplar of an impressive heft for the era, with an 80 centimetre skull equipped with razor-sharp teeth and anterior limbs with four fingers, of which three powerful and clawed, the article said.
    Their anatomy suggests that today's birds' wings derive from a fusion of the first three fingers of teropod dinosaurs, scientists say.
    It took more than 20 years to extract, assemble and interpret the mysterious find from the famed Saltrio marble quarry about 50 miles north of Milan. Now, with the investigation finally complete, the palaeontologists said the fossils discovered in 1996 by an amateur fossilist, Angelo Zanella, are from a new species of dinosaur. A new species warranted a new name. In "Saltriovenator zanellai," "Saltrio" refers to the Italian municipality of discovery, "venator" means hunter in Latin and "zanellai" honours discoverer Zanella. Saltriovenator is the first Jurassic dinosaur from Italy and the most ancient predatory dinosaur of large size yet discovered, said lead study author Dal Sasso of Milan's Natural History Museum.
    "Saltriovenator predates the massive meat-eating dinosaurs by over 25 million years and sheds light on the evolution of the three-fingered hand of birds," Dal Sasso said in a statement.
    Extracting the find from the quarry - which, in 1778, supplied marble slabs for the renowned La Scala Opera House - required 1,800 hours of chemical preparation on more than 300 kilograms (661 pounds) of rock. The result: 132 bone pieces, a dozen rib fragments and 35 bones. Dal Sasso performed a painstaking and systematic analysis, fragment by fragment, to recompose and position the bones. He even went to the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington to consult more complete dinosaur skeletons.
    "Not all fragments match, but many are adjacent and allow us to virtually reconstruct the shape of whole bones," Dal Sasso said in the statement. "To complete the puzzle we also used a 3-D printer: part of the left scapula was turned into the right one thanks to a 'mirroring printing' which gave us a more complete scapula." The final illustrations were made by combining more than 150 image files, he said.
    Saltriovenator is set to be the "top-billed star of an upcoming exhibition," the scientist said.