Paleontologists in Italy have discovered thousands of dinosaur footprints on a remote, nearly vertical cliff in a national park close to Bormio, the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics site, officials announced Tuesday.
The footprints, which number up to 20,000 and date back to the Triassic period, about 210 million years old, were spotted in September by wildlife photographer Elio Della Ferreira.
The prints are up to 40 centimeters (15.7 in) wide and in some cases so well preserved that claw marks are clearly visible, making the discovery one of the most spectacular discoveries in decades.
Speaking at a press conference at the headquarters of the Lombardy region on Tuesday, paleontologist Cristiano Dal Sasso of the Natural History Museum in Milan said, “This is one of the largest and oldest footprint sites in Italy, and one of the most spectacular sites I have seen in 35 years.” “This time, reality has truly overtaken imagination.”
Italy: Which dinosaur made footprints?
Experts believe the footprints were left by a group of long-necked bipedal herbivores similar to Plateosaurus. The creatures, which measured up to 10 meters in length and weighed up to four tonnes, may have existed in the area in prehistoric times when the area was a warm lagoon at the edge of the Tethys Ocean.
“There are very clear traces of individuals who walked at a slow, quiet, rhythmic pace, without running,” Dal Sasso said.
“The footprints were impressed when the sediment was still soft, on the wide tidal flats that surround the Tethys Ocean,” said Fabio Massimo Petti, anthropologist at the MUSE museum in Trento.
“The mud, now turned to rock, has allowed remarkable anatomical details of the feet to be preserved, such as the marks of toes and even claws.”
How were the footprints formed on the side of the mountain?
As the African tectonic plate slowly moved northward, closing and drying up the Tethys Ocean, the soil and sand would have hardened into sedimentary rock that then folded upward to form the Alps.
So the fossilized dinosaur footprints today shifted from their horizontal starting point to their vertical position above the rock, where they were noticed by Della Ferreira while he was photographing deer and vultures.
Della Ferrara said, “The great surprise was not in the discovery of footprints, but in the discovery of such a large quantity.” “There are literally thousands of prints out there, more or less well preserved.”
Given their location about 2,400 to 2,800 meters (7,900–9,200 ft) above sea level and about 600 meters (about 2,000 ft) above the nearest road, the prints are difficult to access. Della Ferrara had to climb a steep rock wall to get a closer look, and experts will have to rely on drones and remote sensing technologies to study it further.
Dinosaur print is an Olympic ‘gift’
But local officials are pleased with the discovery just a few miles from the mountain town of Bormio, where the men’s alpine skiing competition is scheduled to take place during the Winter Olympics in February.
Attilio Fontana, the regional governor of Lombardy, hailed the discovery as a “gift to the Olympics”, while Giovanni Malago, president of the Olympic Organizing Committee, said: “Natural science offers the Milan-Cortina Games an unexpected and priceless gift from distant ages.”
Edited by: Wesley Dockery