Millions of 210-million-year-old dinosaur feet discovered in Italy – National
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 about 40 centimeters wide and appear in parallel lines, and many show detailed details of toes and nails.
The features date back to the Triassic period and are believed to be prosauropods, a type of herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks, small heads and sharp claws.
The print was found in an almost vertical position in the rock 2,000 meters above sea level, which was once the bottom of a warm lake, perfect for dinosaurs to roam the beaches. Experts believe the prints were created by prehistoric herds of animals that left tracks in the mud near the water.
Their shape also suggests that the dinosaurs stopped to rest along the way, as shown by the different shapes and sizes of fingernails.
Get daily world news
Get the day’s top news, politics, economics, and current affairs, delivered to your inbox once a day.
The tracks stretch for about five kilometers in the high-altitude glacier 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 track sites in the world,” according to a press release from the Milan Natural History Museum.
Covered and protected by layers of other types of soil, the tracks remain unchanged for about a quarter of a billion years.
“This is one of the largest and oldest sites in Italy, and among the most amazing sites I’ve seen in 35 years,” said Cristiano Dal Sasso, a biologist at Milan’s Natural History Museum, at a press conference on Tuesday at the headquarters of the Lombardy Region.
Experts say prints are made when the ground is level and soft.
“The steps were impressed when the sediments were still soft, in the large flats around the Tethys Ocean,” said Fabio Massimo Petti, a technical expert at the MUSE museum in Trento, who attended the same conference.
“The mud, now turned into rocks, has allowed the preservation of amazing details of the structure of the feet, such as the development of the toes and even the claws.”
Over millions of years, as the modern African plate moved north, closing and drying the Tethys Ocean, the sedimentary rocks that formed the sea were folded, creating the Alps, causing the dinosaur footprints to move from a horizontal position to a vertical position on the mountain slope.
Elio Della Ferrera, a wildlife photographer, found the first tracks in September and informed experts about the findings. It was the first time anyone had reported seeing this particular set of steps, according to the museum.
Ferrera told the BBC that he hoped the discovery “will wake us all up, highlight how little we know about the places we live in: our home, our planet.”
Experts say that several sites with steps of the same geological age are known. Nevertheless, the museum said, these are “the first dinosaur footprints found in Lombardy and the only ones exposed north of the most important Alpine fault system, the Insubric Line.”
The trails do not reach the ground, so drones and remote sensing technology will have to be used to study it. The prints may belong to previously unknown ichnospecies, a non-biological classification system used by scientists to document patterns in the behavior of ancient organisms when biological knowledge is limited.
“Only future detailed investigations will allow a precise classification,” the museum said.
– With files from Reuters
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
