Italian paleontologists have uncovered thousands of dinosaur footprints on \u200ba near-vertical rock face more than 2,000 metres above sea level in the Stelvio National Park, a \u200ddiscovery they say is among the world’s richest sites for the Triassic period.<\/p>\n
The tracks, some up to 40 cm \u200dwide and showing claw marks, stretch for about five kilometres in the high-altitude glacial Valle di Fraele near Bormio, one of the venues for the 2026 Winter Olympics in the northern region of Lombardy.<\/p>\n
“This \u200cis one of the largest and oldest footprint sites in Italy, and among the most spectacular I’ve seen \u2060in 35 years,” said Cristiano Dal Sasso, paleontologist at Milan’s Natural History Museum \u200cin \u200ba \u200dpress conference on Tuesday at the headquarters of the Lombardy Region.<\/p>\n
Experts believe the prints were left by herds of long-necked herbivores, likely plateosaurs, more than 200 million years ago when the area was a warm \u2060lagoon, ideal for dinosaurs to roam along beaches, leaving tracks in the mud near \u2060the water.<\/p>\n
“The footprints were impressed when the \u2060sediments were still soft, on the wide tidal flats that surrounded the Tethys Ocean,” said Fabio Massimo Petti, ichnologist at MUSE museum \u200dof Trento, attending the same conference.<\/p>\n
“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,” Petti added.<\/p>\n
As the African plate gradually moved north, closing and drying up the Tethys Ocean, sedimentary rocks that formed the seabed were folded, creating the Alps.<\/p>\n
The fossilised dinosaur footprints shifted from a horizontal \u200cposition to the vertical \u200cone on a mountain slope spotted by a wildlife photographer in September while chasing deer and bearded vultures, experts said.<\/p>\n
“The natural sciences deliver to the \u200cMilan-Cortina 2026 Games an unexpected and precious gift from remote eras,” Giovanni Malag\u00f2, President of the Milano \u2060Cortina 2026 Organising Committee told journalists.<\/p>\n
The area cannot be reached by trails, so drones and remote sensing technologies will have to be used to study it. (Reporting by Giancarlo Navach and Giselda Vagnoni; Editing by Hugh Lawson)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Italian paleontologists have uncovered thousands of dinosaur footprints on \u200ba near-vertical rock face more than 2,000 metres above…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":195946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-195945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}