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Thousands of dinosaur footprints dating back hundreds of millions of years have been discovered in northern Italy.
The footprints, which paleontologists say are about 210 million years old, measure approximately 40 centimetres in diameter and appear in parallel rows, with many showing detailed imprints of toes and claws.
The markings date back to the Triassic period and are believed to have belonged to prosauropods, a species of herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks, small heads and sharp claws.
The prints were discovered on a near-vertical rock face 2,000 metres above sea level, which was once the floor of a warm lagoon, ideal for dinosaurs to roam along beaches. Experts believe the prints were created by herds of the prehistoric beasts that left tracks in the mud near the water.
Their positioning also suggests that the dinosaurs stopped to rest along the route, as indicated by handprints that differ in shape and size from the claws.
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The tracks stretch for about five kilometres in the high-altitude glacial Valle di Fraele near Bormio, one of the venues for the 2026 Winter Olympics in the northern Italian region of Lombardy, and represent “one of the most important Triassic fossil track sites in the world,” according to a press release from the Milan Natural History Museum.
Covered and protected by layers of other sediment types, the tracks remained unchanged for almost a quarter of a billion years.
“This is one of the largest and oldest footprint sites in Italy, and among the most spectacular I’ve seen in 35 years,” Cristiano Dal Sasso, paleontologist at Milan’s Natural History Museum, said during a press conference on Tuesday at the headquarters of the Lombardy Region.
Experts say the prints were made when the ground was level and malleable.
“The footprints were impressed when the sediments were still soft, on the wide tidal flats that surrounded the Tethys Ocean,” said Fabio Massimo Petti, ichnologist at MUSE museum of Trento, attending the same conference.
“The muds, now turned to rock, have allowed the preservation of remarkable anatomical details of the feet, such as impressions of the toes and even the claws.”
Over millions of years, as the plate that is modern-day Africa moved north, closing and drying up the Tethys Ocean, sedimentary rocks that formed the seabed were folded, creating the Alps, causing the fossilized dinosaur footprints to shift from a horizontal to a vertical position on a mountain slope.
Elio Della Ferrera, a wildlife photographer, discovered the primeval tracks in September and alerted experts to the findings. It was the first time anyone had reported seeing this particular collection of footprints, according to the museum.
Ferrera told the BBC he hoped the discovery would “spark reflection in all of us, highlighting how little we know about the places we live in: our home, our planet.”
Experts say several sites with footprints of the same geological age are known. Still, the museum said, these are the “first dinosaur footprints discovered in Lombardy and the only ones exposed north of one of the most important Alpine fault systems, the Insubric Line.”
Trails do not reach the area, so drones and remote sensing technologies will have to be used to study it. The prints may belong to a previously unidentified ichnospecies, a non-biological classification system used by scientists to log patterns in the behaviour of ancient organisms when biological information is sparse.
“Only future detailed investigations will allow for precise classification,” the museum said.
— With files from Reuters
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