Francesco Bassani (29 October 1853 – 26 April 1916) was an Italian geologist and paleontologist among the first to identify

ichthyosaur Ichthyosauria is an order of large extinct marine reptiles sometimes referred to as "ichthyosaurs", although the term is also used for wider clades in which the order resides. Ichthyosaurians thrived during much of the Mesozoic era; based on fo ...

fossils from northern Italy. Bassani was born in

Thiene Thiene () is a city and ''comune'' in the province of Vicenza, in northern Italy, located approximately west of Venice and east of Milan. __NOTOC__ The city has an active and lively industrial sector, composed mainly of small to medium-sized co ...

, studied at

Vicenza Vicenza ( , ; or , archaically ) is a city in northeastern Italy. It is in the Veneto region, at the northern base of the Monte Berico, where it straddles the Bacchiglione, River Bacchiglione. Vicenza is approximately west of Venice and e ...

and graduated from the University of Padua where he studied under . He also studied in Paris under

Albert Gaudry Jean Albert Gaudry (16 September 1827 – 27 November 1908) was a French geologist and palaeontologist. He was born at St Germain-en-Laye, and was educated at the Catholic Collège Stanislas de Paris. He was a notable proponent of theistic evolu ...

Melchior Neumayr Melchior Neumayr (24 October 1845 – 29 January 1890) was an palaeontologist from Austria-Hungary and the son of Max von Neumayr, a Bavarian Minister of State. He specialized on the Jurassic and Cretaceous of the Alps. Neumayr introduced the co ...

and

Edward Suess Eduard Suess (; 20 August 1831 – 26 April 1914) was an Austrian geologist and an expert on the geography of the Alps. He is responsible for hypothesising two major former geographical features, the supercontinent Gondwana (proposed in 1861) and ...

in Vienna and

Karl Alfred von Zittel Karl Alfred Ritter von Zittel (25 September 1839 – 5 January 1904) was a German palaeontologist best known for his ''Handbuch der Palaeontologie'' (1876–1880). Biography Karl Alfred von Zittel was born in Bahlingen in the Grand Duchy ...

in Munich between 1877 and 1879. He worked in Padua for a while, then moved to Milan in 1883 and collaborated with Antonio Stoppani between 1882 and 1885. He became a director of the institute of geology in Naples in 1887 and worked there until his death. He described numerous fossils from Italian localities including an ichthyosaur from

Besano Besano is a town and ''comune'' located in the province of Varese, in the Lombardy region of northern Italy. Paleontological site The fossils of Besano In 1993 the fossil of a Triassic aquatic reptile dating back to about 235 million years wa ...

. He described fossil fish from Chiavon with illustrations made by his Dutch-origin wife Everdina Douwes Dekker who he married in 1880. A mineral from Vesuvius was named after him as

bassanite Bassanite is a calcium sulfate mineral with formula CaSO4· H2O or 2CaSO4·H2O. In other words it has half a water molecule per CaSO4 unit, hence its synonym ''calcium sulfate hemihydrate''. Bassanite was first described in 1910 for an occurren ...

in 1906. He died at Capri.

References

University of Padua alumni Academic staff of the University of Naples Federico II Members of the Lincean Academy 1916 deaths 1853 births Italian ichthyologists Italian paleontologists 19th-century Italian geologists 20th-century Italian geologists {{DEFAULTSORT:Bassani ,Francesco