Thousands of Dinosaur Footprints Found Close to Where Italy Will Host Winter Olympics

Next year, northern Italy will host the 2026 Winter Olympics. But the region made headlines six weeks earlier, when regional authorities announced the discovery of a well-preserved dinosaur footprint trail.

Attilio Fontana, head of the Lombardy region, called the discovery of footprints “one of the largest collections in all of Europe and the whole world” during a recent press conference.

Learn more: Duck-billed dinosaurs broke off their companions’ tails, revealing the sex and sexual difference of dinosaurs

Footprints on the side of a mountain

Photographer Elio Della Ferrera was exploring the picturesque Stelvio National Park in September 2025 when he spotted the tracks on the side of a near-vertical rock outcropping. The prints, which stretched hundreds of meters, contained identifying features, such as toes and claws. Some measured up to 16 inches in diameter.

Fontana said the printed trail “stretches for hundreds of meters and also depicts a series of animal behaviors, because in addition to seeing animals walking together, there are also places where these animals meet.”

Shortly after Ferrera’s discovery, a team of Italian paleontologists descended on the park to study the footprints in more detail. Cristiano Dal Sasso, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in Milan, described the discoveries as “an immense scientific heritage.”

“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,” Dal Sasso added.

The researchers can easily date their new discovery, because the rock in which the tracks are imprinted is Upper Triassic dolomitic rocks 210 million years old. The prints appear to have been made by two-legged animals, some with at least four toes.

Brontosaurus ancestors and ancient crocodiles

Experts have proposed that the footprints belong to herbivorous dinosaurs called prosauropods. These animals are thought to be the ancestors of huge Jurassic sauropods like Brontosaurus. They shared the small head and long neck of Brontosaurus and could measure up to 33 feet long.

Not all of the prints belonged to calm leaf eaters. Some appeared to have been abandoned by predatory dinosaurs. Archosaurs, the ancient predecessors of today’s crocodiles, may have made some of the other footprints, experts suggest.

When dinosaurs made their tracks, they roamed on flat tidal plains in a tropical environment. Since then, the world has changed a bit and the Alps have emerged, transforming the flat terrain into the almost vertical face of a mountain.

“The prints were made when the sediments were still soft and saturated with water, on the broad flats surrounding the Tethys Ocean,” said fossil expert Fabio Massimo Petti. The Tethys Ocean was a huge prehistoric body of water that today has become the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the inland lakes of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.

The mud bordering the sea then turned into rock, which preserved the embedded footprints. Subsequent erosion of the present-day mountainside once again revealed the footprints to the world. The discoveries were reported at the end of a year full of dinosaur discoveries, which included 115 million-year-old footprints revealed by Texas floodwaters, a massive chain of 16,000 footprints spread across a national park in Bolivia and a “dinosaur highway” revealed in an English limestone quarry.

Learn more: Footprints from around 150 million years ago reveal the strange stomping of a looping sauropod

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