Hundreds of dinosaur footprints dating back a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of years have been discovered in northern Italy.
The footprints, which paleontologists say are about 210 million years old, measure roughly 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 ground of a warm lagoon, ideal for dinosaurs to roam along beaches. Experts consider the prints were created by herds of the prehistoric beasts that left tracks within 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 within the high-altitude glacial Valle di Fraele near Bormio, certainly one of the venues for the 2026 Winter Olympics within the northern Italian region of Lombardy, and represent “probably the most necessary Triassic fossil track sites on this planet,” in response to a press release from the Milan Natural History Museum.
Covered and guarded by layers of other sediment types, the tracks remained unchanged for nearly 1 / 4 of a billion years.
“That is certainly one of the most important and oldest footprint sites in Italy, and amongst essentially 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 on the headquarters of the Lombardy Region.
Experts say the prints were made when the bottom 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 identical conference.
“The muds, now turned to rock, have allowed the preservation of remarkable anatomical details of the feet, reminiscent of impressions of the toes and even the claws.”
Over hundreds of thousands of years, because the plate that’s 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 primary time anyone had reported seeing this particular collection of footprints, in response to the museum.
Ferrera told the BBC he hoped the invention would “spark reflection in all of us, highlighting how little we all know concerning the places we live in: our home, our planet.”
Experts say several sites with footprints of the identical geological age are known. Still, the museum said, these are the “first dinosaur footprints discovered in Lombardy and the one ones exposed north of probably the most necessary Alpine fault systems, the Insubric Line.”
Trails don’t reach the world, so drones and distant sensing technologies could have for use to check it. The prints may belong to a previously unidentified ichnospecies, a non-biological classification system utilized by scientists to log patterns within 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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