This document is an excerpt, certainly the most amazing part, of an urban bestiary published in Milan in the distant 2020.

About sixty-six million years before that date, dinosaurs were still walking the earth. They were gigantic and their life depended on the availability of vast spaces and unlimited resources. Life on earth, however, was already becoming increasingly diversified as more and more species appeared and those vast spaces began to be shared by an increasing number of animals.

The animals that did so evolved by reducing, in order to survive, their physical dimensions, so as to reduce, with those, their need for resources and space. Life for giants was no longer sustainable. The extinction of the dinosaurs became inevitable.

In the years leading up to 2020, starting from the last century of the second millennium, a significant renewal of architecture and design is taking place all over the world. It is an era during which cities are equipped with magnificent, tall buildings. It is with the advent of this new architecture and a new concept of urban planning that a world on a grand scale — that of skyscrapers — makes its reappearance. The re-expansion of space created the conditions for dinosaurs to return.

Known to scientists and scholars for the amazing shapes of their bodies and heads, already shown in prehistoric times and testimony to the prolific ‘fantasy’ of nature, the dinosaurs seem to rediscover — in Milan, recognized as the capital of modern design worldwide, that same fantasy, and I assume that urban area as an elective territory for their return.

With an exquisite and inexplicable adaptation, (one could call it a tribute, if not a tribute to animals), to the aesthetic effort and engineering feats that have emerged in Milan, not only at the turn of the millennia, but throughout its history, dinosaurs populate the Lombard metropolis reproducing themselves with the most daring biomorphic variety.

What you are about to see is a detailed description of a formidable new species of saurians, with new shapes and appearances. A species that has wonderfully integrated itself, millions of years later, into a modern world. In this document an admirable and protean case of ‘evolutionary return’ is illustrated. Here are the milanosaurs.

Andrea Rossi graduated in Advertising from Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan, Italy. ‘Interactive environments’ was the subject of his thesis, which resulted in an interactive installation celebrating Coupé, a car produced by Fiat. To date, Rossi’s work comprises paintings, videos, interactive installation projects, and experiments involving computer languages such as HTML5 and CSS.