A photographer discovers miles of dinosaur tracks near Italy’s Winter Olympic venues

Have you ever watched the Olympics and thought “this would be better with a hint of dinosaurs?” Well, you’re in luck.

On Tuesday, Italian officials announced the discovery of thousands of dinosaur tracks on “nearly vertical dolomite walls” in Stelvio National Park, a protected area in the central Alps of northern Italy.

The prints were found high in the mountains between the towns of Livigno and Bormio, where some of the Winter Olympics will take place in February.

“Just a few weeks before the opening of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics, this discovery sheds an unexpected and fascinating light on the mountains of Lombardy,” Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala said in a statement, referring to the northern Italian region of which Milan is the capital.

The 2026 Games are co-hosted by Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, with competitions spanning some two dozen locations at venues across northern Italy. The slopes of Livigno will house freestyle skiing and snowboarding events, while the resort town of Bormio will be home to alpine skiing and the new sport of ski mountaineering.

Scientists determined the footprints date back some 210 million years, to the Late Triassic period. Milan’s Natural History Museum says the roughly 3-mile wide “valley of the dinosaurs” is “the largest site in the Alps and one of the richest in the world.”

Nature photographer Elio Della Ferrara stumbled upon the dinosaur tracks in September while following deer and vultures in the Fraele Valley, an area near Bormio known for its mountainous landscape and artificial lakes.

The Associated Press reports that Della Ferrera’s camera was focused on a vertical rock wall some 2,000 feet above the nearest road when something unusual caught his eye. He managed to scale the wall to see the prints — what he called “tens of thousands” of them — for himself.

“The tracks, preserved in excellent condition despite the altitude, show traces of toes and claws imprinted on the walls when they were tidal flats at the end of the Triassic,” the Natural History Museum says. That period spanned 252 to 201 million years ago.

Della Ferrara notified authorities of his findings, setting paleontological research into motion. Preliminary analyses suggest most of the tracks came from “herbivorous prosauropod dinosaurs” — the long-necked creatures that predate enormous sauropods like the ones depicted in the “Jurassic Park” franchise.

Italian officials say these are the first dinosaur tracks ever found in the Lombardy region, as well as the only ones discovered north of the Insubric Line, a key tectonic boundary that forms the southern edge of the Alps. The dinosaurs would have walked on soft tidal flats that turned to rock over time as the mountain range was created, experts said during a news conference Tuesday according to Reuters.

Various prosauropod fossils have been found on most continents — including Asia and the Americas — but especially in northern Europe (particularly Germany), leading scientists to believe they primarily roamed there, according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

But there is still a lot unknown about prosauropods, like exactly how many subgroups there were and their direct evolutionary relationship to sauropods. Italian officials hope this discovery may lead to answers.

“The studies that will continue following the discovery of these footprints will allow us to better understand the history of our planet and the land we inhabit,” said Sala, Milan’s mayor.

The area of the tracks is not accessible by trails, officials say, meaning researchers will rely on drones and remote sensing technologies to study them. It may not be open to the public anytime soon, but it is cool to think some Olympic competitors may be walking in the shadows of a different kind of legend.