Dinosaur tracks showing ‘herds moving in synchrony’ found in Italian region to host Winter Olympics

Hundreds of meters of dinosaur footprints featuring toes and claws have been discovered in the Italian Alps, in a region that will host the 2026 Winter Olympics, authorities announced Tuesday.

“This set of dinosaur footprints constitutes one of the largest collections in all of Europe and the world,” Attilio Fontana, head of the Lombardy region in northern Italy, told a news conference.

The traces, more than 200 million years old, were discovered in the Stelvio National Park, in an area between the towns of Bormio and Livigno, which are hosting part of the Games.

Nature photographer Elio Della Ferrera first spotted the footprints in September on a near-vertical rock slope.

Some measured up to 16 inches in diameter.

The collection “extends hundreds of meters and also represents a series of animal behaviors, because in addition to seeing animals walking together, there are also places where these animals meet,” Fontana explained.

Della Ferrera called on paleontologist Cristiano Dal Sasso of the Natural History Museum in Milan, who assembled a team of Italian experts to study the site.

The museum posted several images on social media of the footprints discovered in the so-called Valley of the Dinosaurs.

“It is an immense scientific heritage,” Dal Sasso said in the region’s statement.

“The parallel walks are clear evidence of herds moving in synchrony, and there are also traces of more complex behaviors, such as groups of animals gathered in a circle, perhaps to defend themselves.”

“Toe and even claw impressions”

The trails, currently covered in snow and off the beaten track, are preserved in Upper Triassic dolomitic rocks, dating back around 210 million years.

Most prints are elongated and made by bipeds. The best preserved bear traces of at least four toes.

This suggests that they belong to prosauropods, herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks and small heads, which are considered the ancestors of large Jurassic sauropods like Brontosaurus, according to experts.

Prosauropods had sharp claws, and adults could reach up to 33 feet long.

There could also be traces of predatory dinosaurs and archosaurs, ancestors of crocodiles, the press release said.

The footprints are on an almost vertical slope due to the formation of the Alpine chain.

But when dinosaurs crossed the region, it was made up of mudflats that stretched for hundreds of kilometers and the environment was tropical.

“The traces were traced when the sediments were still soft and saturated with water, on the large flats surrounding the Tethys ocean,” explained ichnologist Fabio Massimo Petti, referring to a prehistoric ocean.

“The plasticity of these very fine limestone muds, now transformed into rock, has preserved in certain areas truly remarkable anatomical details, such as toe prints and even claws,” he said.

The footprints were then covered by sediment which protected them, but with the uplift of the Alps and the erosion of the mountain sides, they were made visible.

“As the layers containing the tracks are diverse and overlapping, we have a unique opportunity to study the evolution of animals and their environments over time,” said geologist Fabrizio Berra. “It’s like reading the pages of a stone book.”

Other recent discoveries of dinosaur tracks

Researchers have recently discovered more dinosaur footprints.

Earlier this month, Bolivian paleontologists said they had found and meticulously documented 16,600 footprints left by theropodsthe group of dinosaurs that includes Tyrannosaurus rex.

In March, English scientists discovered a 200-meter trail of dinosaur footprints left 160 million years ago by enormous sauropod dinosaurs.

In January, British researchers uncovered 200 dinosaur footprints dating back 166 million years in a discovery believed to be the UK’s largest.

This discovery was announced just months after a team of paleontologists discovered match dinosaur footprints on what are now two different continents, separated by thousands of kilometers of ocean.

In October 2023, British engineers carried out a “dramatic discovery” of dinosaur footprints that experts say may come from a mantellisaur, a type of dinosaur that had only three toes on each foot and moved on its hind legs.