210-million-years old dinosaur footprints numbering thousands uncovered in Italian national park

Palaeontologists have made an amazing discovery in a national park in Italy, uncovering thousands of dinosaur footprints that somehow remained a secret till now. They were found in an area of the Italian Alps which will host the 2026 Winter Olympics. Dating back 210 million years, some of them are 15 inches in diameter. The marks are so clear that anyone seeing them can clearly make out the toes and claws. According to experts, these marks belong to prosauropods, long-necked herbivores. The discovery was made by a photographer, Elio Della Ferrera, last September on a vertical mountain wall. They are spread across an area spanning hundreds of metres.

"This set of dinosaur footprints is one of the largest collections in all of Europe, in the whole world," Attilio Fontana, head of the Lombardy region in northern Italy, said during a news conference. This mountain wall wasn't like this during the period of these dinosaurs. Between 250 and 201 million years ago, around the Triassic period, this was a low-lying, flat coastal area full of either mud or sand. This tidal flat later became part of the Alpine chain.

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Dinosaur footprint pattern shows complex behaviour

Milan-based palaeontologist Cristiano Dal Sasso said in a statement that this place was full of dinosaurs during this period. These dinosaurs lived in groups, as they have also found "traces of more complex behaviours", such as forming circles, likely to defend against a common predator. Prosauropods walked on two legs, but some of the prints are of the front limbs. These were probably formed when they stopped to rest their front limbs.

The Italian culture ministry said in a press release that this is a remote area and not accessible by paths. For further research, scientists will have to use remote sensing technology and drones. The Stelvio National Park sits in a valley near Italy's border with Switzerland.

Mosasaur tooth in North Dakota

Discoveries from the time of dinosaurs are still regularly being made. This shows how little we have found out about these mammoth ancestors who once walked Earth. A few years ago, a team of scientists found a T. rex tooth in Hell Creek, North Dakota, which led them to find a mosasaur tooth. Mosasaurs were known to live in salty seawater, but this finding was made at a place that was thousands of kilometres away from the ocean. This showed that they had adapted to living in freshwater.