Italy: Mass dinosaur footprint discovery near Olympics venue

Thousands of dinosaur footprints have been discovered in the Italian Alps close to the 2026 Winter Olympics venue of Bormio. The well preserved tracks are thought to be over 200 million years old.

Paleontologists in Italy have uncovered thousands of dinosaur footprints on a remote, near-vertical rock face in a national park close to the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics venue of Bormio, officials announced on Tuesday.

The footprints, which number up to 20,000 and which date back around 210 million years to the Triassic Period, were spotted by wildlife photographer Elio Della Ferrera back in September.

The prints measure up to 40 centimeters wide (15.7 inches) and in some cases are so well preserved that claw marks are clearly visible, making the find one of the most spectacular discoveries in decades.

"This is one of the largest and oldest footprint sites in Italy, and among the most spectacular I've seen in 35 years," said Cristiano Dal Sasso, paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in Milan, speaking at a press conference at the headquarters of the Lombardy Region on Tuesday. "This time, reality really does surpass fantasy."

Italy: Which dinosaurs created the footprints?

Experts believe the footprints were left by herds of long-necked bipedal herbivores similar to a Plateosaurus. The creatures, which measured up to 10 meters in length and weighed up to four tons, would have been present in the region in prehistoric times when the area was a warm lagoon on the edge of what used to be the Tethys Ocean.

"There are very obvious traces of individuals that have walked at a slow, calm, quiet rhythmic pace, without running,'' Dal Sasso explained.

"The footprints were impressed when the sediments were still soft, on the wide tidal flats that surrounded the Tethys Ocean," posited Fabio Massimo Petti, ichnologist at MUSE museum of Trento, adding:

"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."

How did the footprints end up on the side of a mountain?

As the African tectonic plate gradually moved north, closing and drying up the Tethys Ocean, the muds and sands would have hardened into sedimentary rock which were then folded upwards to form the Alps.

The fossilized dinosaur footprints therefore shifted from their horizontal starting point to their vertical position high up on the rock face today, where they were spotted by Della Ferrera when he was out photographing deer and vultures.

"The huge surprise was not so much in discovering the footprints, but in discovering such a huge quantity," Della Ferrara said. "There are really tens of thousands of prints up there, more or less well-preserved."

Given their location some 2,400 to 2,800 meters (7,900-9,200 feet) above sea level and about 600 meters (nearly 2,000 feet) above the nearest road, the prints are difficult to access. Della Ferrara had to scale a vertical rock wall to get a closer look, and experts are going to have to rely on drones and remote sensing technologies to study them further.

Dinosaur prints are an Olympic 'gift'

But local officials are delighted about the discovery just a few miles from the mountain town of Bormio, where the Men's Alpine skiing competition is due to take place during the Winter Olympics in February.

Attilio Fontana, the regional governor of Lombardy, hailed the discovery as a "gift for the Olympics," while Giovanni Malago, President of the Olympic Organizing Committee, said: "The natural sciences deliver to the Milan-Cortina Games an unexpected and precious gift from remote eras."

Edited by: Wesley Dockery