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Several Olympic competitors will compete where giants once roamed.
A wildlife photographer from Italy accidentally stumbled upon one of the oldest and largest known collections of dinosaur tracks in a national park near 2026. Winter Olympic Games in Milan Cortina venue in Bormio, officials said Tuesday. The park entrance where the prints were found is about a mile from the men's alpine skiing event.
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In this photograph taken in September 2025 and published on Tuesday, December 16, 2025 by the Stelvio National Park, tracks of Late Triassic prosauropods are visible on the slopes of the Freel Valley in northern Italy. (Elio Della Ferrera/Stelvio National Park via AP)
Milan Natural History Museum paleontologist Cristiano Dal Sasso estimates that some 20,000 tracks date back to the Triassic period, about 210 million years ago, and were left by long-necked bipedal herbivores, 33 feet long and weighing up to four tons, similar to Plateosaurus.
“This time reality really surpasses fantasy,” Dal Sasso added.
Wildlife photographer Elio Della Ferrera makes a discovery Stelvio National Park near the Swiss border in September. According to experts, the site is considered a prehistoric coastal area where there have never been dinosaur footprints before.
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This photo, taken in September 2025 and published on Tuesday, December 16, 2025, by the Stelvio National Park, shows the footprint of a Late Triassic prosauropod discovered in northern Italy. (Elio Della Ferrara/Stelvio National Park via AP)
The site is located at about 7,900 to 9,200 feet above sea level on the north face, which is mostly in the shade. Dal Sasso said, adding that the tracks were difficult to detect without a very strong lens.
“The huge surprise was not so much the discovery of the traces, but the discovery of such a huge number,” Della Ferrera said. “There really are tens of thousands of prints, more or less well preserved.”
Although there are currently no plans to make the tracks available to the public, Lombardy Governor Attilio Fontana called the discovery “a gift for the Olympic Games.”
Governor of the Lombardy region Attilio Fontana attends a press conference in Milan, Italy, Tuesday, December 16, 2025, regarding the discovery of thousands of dinosaur tracks in the Lombardy region. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
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The Winter Olympics will take place from February 6 to 22.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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