Italian paleontologists have discovered thousands of dinosaur footprints on a nearly vertical rock face more than 2,000 meters above sea level in Italy’s Stelvio National Park. The discovery, they say, is among the richest sites in the world for the Triassic period.
The footprints, some up to 40cm wide and bearing claw marks, extend for around five kilometers into the high-altitude Valle di Fraele glacier near Bormio, one of the sites of the 2026 Winter Olympics in northern Lombardy.
“It is one of the largest and oldest footprint sites in Italy, and one of the most spectacular I have seen in 35 years,” Cristiano Dal Sasso, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Milan, said during a press conference Tuesday at the Lombardy Region headquarters.
Experts believe the footprints were left by herds of long-necked herbivores, probably platosaurs, more than 200 million years ago, when the area was a warm lagoon, ideal for dinosaurs to wander along the beaches, leaving tracks in the mud near the water.
“The prints were printed while the sediments were still soft, on the large flats that surrounded the Tethys Ocean,” Fabio Massimo Petti, an ichnologist at the Muse museum in Trento, told the press.
“The mud, now transformed into rock, has preserved remarkable anatomical details of the feet, such as fingerprints and even claws,” Petti added.
As the African Plate gradually moved northward, closing and drying the Tethys Ocean, the sedimentary rocks that formed the seafloor folded, creating the Alps. Fossilized dinosaur footprints moved from a horizontal to a vertical position on the side of a mountain. They were spotted by a wildlife photographer in September while hunting deer and bearded vultures, according to experts.
“Natural sciences offer the Milan-Cortina 2026 Games an unexpected and precious gift from distant times,” Giovanni Malagò, president of the Milan-Cortina 2026 organizing committee, told journalists.
The area is not accessible by trail, so drones and remote sensing technologies will need to be used to study it.
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