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A handful of Olympic participants will compete where giants once roamed.
An Italian wildlife photographer stumbled upon one of the oldest and largest known collections of dinosaur footprints in a national park near the site of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina, Bormio, officials said Tuesday. The entrance to the park, where the footprints were discovered, is located about a mile from where the men’s alpine skiing event will take place.
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In this photograph taken in September 2025 and published on Tuesday December 16, 2025 by the Stelvio National Park, Upper Triassic prosauropod footprints are visible on the slopes of the Fraeel Valley in northern Italy. (Elio Della Ferrera/Stelvio National Park via AP)
The 20,000 footprints are thought to date back about 210 million years to the Triassic period and were made by long-necked bipedal herbivores measuring 33 feet long and weighing up to four tons, similar to a plateosaurus, said Cristiano Dal Sasso, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in Milan.
“This time the reality is truly beyond imagination,” Dal Sasso added.
Wildlife photographer Elio Della Ferrera made the discovery at Stelvio National Park, near the Swiss border, in September. The place is considered a prehistoric coastal area that never left traces of dinosaurs, according to experts.
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This photograph, taken in September 2025 and published on Tuesday December 16, 2025 by Stelvio National Park, shows a Late Triassic prosauropod footprint discovered in the Fraele Valley in northern Italy. (Elio Della Ferrara/Stelvio National Park via AP)
The location is approximately 7,900 to 9,200 feet above sea level, on a north-facing wall and mostly in shade. said Dal Sasso, adding that the prints were a little difficult to spot without a very powerful lens.
“The big surprise was not so much the discovery of the prints, but the discovery of such a quantity,” Della Ferrera said. “There are really tens of thousands of prints up there, more or less well preserved.”
Although there are currently no plans to make the prints publicly available, Lombardy’s regional governor, Attilio Fontana, hailed the discovery as a “gift for the Olympics.”
Lombardy region governor Attilio Fontana attends a news conference in Milan, Italy, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, about the discovery of thousands of dinosaur tracks in the Lombardy region. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
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The Winter Olympics are scheduled to take place February 6-22.
