Over 200 dinosaur footprints throws new light on species

200 million years ago, prosauropods walked the earth. They left something behind

- ELISABETTA POVOLEDO AND VICTOR MATHER

NATURE PHOTOGRAPHER seeking shots of bearded vultures and red deer in the Italian Alps discovered a cache of dinosaur footprints that scientists are calling “remarkable.”

The finding in Stelvio National Park, near the Swiss border, that was unveiled on Tuesday consists of thousands of fossilised footprints more than 200 million years old. The tracks, some of them stretching for hundreds of yards, are so well preserved that marks of toes and claws are visible.

While working on a project in the Italian region of Lombardy, in mid-September, the photographer, Elio Della Ferrera, spotted “something strange” through a telephoto lens. He had worked on paleontological projects and said he knew he was onto something.

Della Ferrera wanted a closer look. Fighting dense thickets of trees without trails to guide him, he hiked for two hours or so up steep slopes. It took “a lot of effort,” he said. “The last few hundred metres are really difficult to cover because they are vertical, and there is this crumbly layer on top of a hard bottom layer.”

“But I arrived right there, in front of these footprints.”