The province of Rovigo has an area of and is the most southern of the provinces of the Veneto region, and its territory is almost flat, without mountains. The highest point of the province is in the Bergantino "comune", to the west of the province; it is only high.
The province is rich in water, with the presence of the two longest rivers of Italy: the Po and the Adige rivers. Both flow from west to east and into the Adriatic Sea and most of the territory of the province is between these two rivers: the Adige in the north of the province and the Po in the south of it.
The province of Rovigo borders to the northwest with the Verona province, to the north with the Padua province and the Metropolitan City of Venice, to the west with the Lombardy region (Mantua province) and to the south with the Ferrara Emilia-Romagna region. The Adriatic Sea is to the east.
, there are 240,540 persons living in the province, for a population density of inhabitants/km².
Evolution of the population in the Rovigo province
There are 50 municipalities (or "comuni") in the province; they are:
The following shows the 10 "comuni" with the population, and the area and altitude.
Oded Fehr
Oded Fehr (; born 23 November 1970 in Tel Aviv) is an Israeli film and television actor. He acted in "The Mummy".
Cascade
A cascade is
Cascade may also mean:
WALES, UK
Cascade, Rhymney Valley,
Dromaeosauridae
Dromaeosaurs are a family of bird-like theropod dinosaurs. They include the famous "Velociraptor" and "Deinonychus". They were small to medium-sized feathered carnivores which flourished in the Cretaceous period.
They are often called raptors, a term popularized by the movie "Jurassic Park". They were fast-running predators.
Dromaeosaurs had a world-wide distribution. They first appeared in the Middle Jurassic, 167 million years ago (mya). The larger types are not found before about 124 mya in the Lower Cretaceous, and are only found in the northern hemisphere. They survived until the end of the Cretaceous, 65.5 mya at the K/T extinction event.
The presence of dromaeosaurs in the Middle Jurassic is shown by isolated fossil teeth, though no dromaeosaurid body fossils have been found this early.
The Dromaeosaur skeleton suggests they were active, fast-running, and closely related to birds.
Dromaeosaurs have a relatively large skull, serrated teeth, narrow snout, and forward-facing eyes with some degree of binocular vision.
Dromaeosaurs, like most other theropods, had an S-curved neck, and their trunk was relatively short and deep. Like other maniraptorans, they had long arms, and relatively large hands with three long fingers ending in large claws.
The dromaeosaur hip structure featured a large 'pubic boot' (part of the hip) projecting beneath the base of the tail. These hip bones were places muscle and tendons attached.
Dromaeosaur feet bore a large, recurved claw on the second toe. Their tails were slender, and mainly used as a counterbalance.
Some, and probably all, dromaeosaurs were covered in feathers, including large, vaned, wing and tail feathers.
Like other theropods, dromaeosaurs were bipedal; that is, they walked on their hind legs. Whereas other theropods walked with three toes on the ground, fossilized footprint tracks show that most dromaeosaurs held the second toe off the ground, with only the third and fourth toes bearing the weight of the animal. The enlarged second toe bore an unusually large, curved sickle-shaped claw. It is thought to have been used in capturing prey and, in the smaller species, climbing trees.
One dromaeosaur species, "Balaur bondoc", had a first toe which was highly modified in parallel with the second. Both the first and second toes on each foot of "B. bondoc" were also held retracted and bore enlarged, sickle-shaped claws.
Dromaeosaurs had long tails. Most of the tail vertebrae bear bony, rod-like extensions, as well as bony tendons in some species. In his study of "Deinonychus", Ostrom proposed that these features stiffened the tail so that it could only flex at the base, and the whole tail would then move as a single, rigid, lever. However, one well-preserved specimen of "Velociraptor mongoliensis" (IGM 100/986) has an articulated tail skeleton which is curved horizontally in an S-shape. This suggests that, in life, the tail could bend from side to side with some degree of flexibility. It has been proposed that this tail was used as a stabilizer and/or counterweight while running. In "Microraptor", an elongate diamond-shaped fan of feathers is preserved on the end of the tail. This might have been used as a stabilizer and rudder during gliding.
Dromaeosaurs were small to medium-sized dinosaurs, ranging from about 0.7 meters in length (2.3 ft, in the case of "Mahakala") to over 6m (20 ft, in "Utahraptor" and "Achillobator"). Some were larger; undescribed specimens of "Utahraptor" in BYU collections may have been up to long. Large size appears to have evolved at least twice among dromaeosaurs. A possible third lineage of giant dromaeosaurs is represented by isolated teeth found on the Isle of Wight, England. The teeth belong to a "Utahraptor"-sized animal but are more similar in shape to the teeth of velociraptorines.
"Mahakala" is both the most primitive dromaeosaur ever described and the smallest. This evidence, and "Microraptor" and the troodontid "Anchiornis", suggests the common ancestor of dromaeosaurs, troodontids, and birds – the 'ancestral paravian' – may have been very small, at around 65 cm in length and 600 to 700 grams of mass.
Fossils show that dromaeosaurs were covered in feathers. Some fossils preserve long feathers on the hands and arms ("remiges") and tail ("rectrices"), as well as shorter, down-like feathers covering the body.
Other fossils, which do not preserve actual impressions of feathers, still preserve the associated bumps on the forearm bones where long wing feathers would have attached in life. Overall, this feather pattern looks very much like "Archaeopteryx".
The first known dromaeosaur with definitive evidence of feathers was "Sinornithosaurus", reported from China by Xu "et al." in 1999.
Many other dromaeosaur fossils have been found with feathers covering their bodies, some with fully-developed feathered wings. "Microraptor" even shows evidence of a second pair of wings on the hind legs. While direct feather impressions are only possible in fine-grained sediments, some fossils found in coarser rocks show evidence of feathers by the presence of quill knobs, the attachment points for wing feathers possessed by some birds. The dromaeosaurids "Rahonavis" and "Velociraptor" have both been found with quill knobs, showing that these forms had feathers despite no impressions having been found.
In light of this, it is most likely that even the larger ground-dwelling dromaeosaurs bore feathers, since even flightless birds today retain most of their plumage, and relatively large dromaeosaurs, like "Velociraptor", are known to have had feathers.
There is some discussion about the function of the enlarged "sickle claw" on the second toe. When John Ostrom described it for "Deinonychus" in 1969, he interpreted the claw as a blade-like slashing weapon, much like the canines of some saber-toothed cats, used with powerful kicks to cut into prey. Adams (1987) suggested that the talon was used to disembowel large ceratopsian dinosaurs. The interpretation of the sickle claw as a killing weapon applied to all dromaeosaurs.
In Manning's interpretation, the second toe claw would be used as a climbing aid when subduing bigger prey and also as stabbing weapon.
Ostrom compared "Deinonychus" to the ostrich and cassowary. He noted that the bird species can inflict serious injury with the large claw on the second toe. The cassowary has claws up to long. The seriema also has an enlarged second toe claw, and uses it to tear apart small prey items for swallowing.