A hiker in the northern Italian Alps has come across the first trace of what scientists believe is an entire prehistoric ecosystem, including the well-preserved footprints of reptiles and amphibians, revealed by melting snow and ice caused by the climate crisis was caused. .
The discovery in the Valtellina Orobie mountain range in Lombardy dates back 280 million years to the Permian period, the age immediately before dinosaurs, scientists say.
Claudia Steffensen, from Lovero, a town in the Sondrio province, and her husband were on a rocky trail in the Ambria Valley, near the Swiss border, when she stepped on a pale gray rock covered with “strange designs” are covered.
“It was a very hot day last summer and we wanted to escape the heat, so we went to the mountains,” Steffensen told the Guardian. “On the way back down, we had to walk very carefully along the path. My husband was in front of me looking straight ahead, while I looked at my feet. I put my foot on a rock, which struck me as strange, as it looked more like a slab of cement. I then noticed these strange circular designs with wavy lines. I looked at it more closely and realized it was footprints.”
Steffensen took a photo and sent it to her friend Elio Della Ferrera, a photographer specializing in the natural world. Della Ferrera then sent the photo to Cristiano Dal Sasso, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in Milan, who in turn consulted other experts.
The footprints, found 1,700 meters above sea level, turned out to belong to a prehistoric reptile.
The experts mapped an area of the Valtellina Orobie Natural Park, including at altitudes of almost 3,000 meters, and visits to the site since summer 2023 revealed hundreds of other fossilized footprints of reptiles, amphibians and insects, which according to they were often still in line. to form “tracks”. The spores are believed to come from at least five different animal species.
Dal Sasso said in a statement: “Dinosaurs did not yet exist, but the authors of the largest footprints must still have been of considerable size – up to 2-3 meters long.”
Lorenzo Marchetti, an iconologist, or trace fossil specialist, at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, said the preservation of the footprints was such that they revealed “impressive details”. “For example, the prints of fingernails and the stomach skin of some animals,” he added.
The ecosystem has also revealed fossilized fragments of plants, seeds and even imprints of raindrops.
The Permian period ended with the greatest mass extinction, triggered by a sudden rise in temperature, that the world has ever known. Global warming today has revealed tracks of other prehistoric animals in the Italian Alps, including the footprints of a crocodilian reptile found at an altitude of 2,200 meters in Altopiano della Gardetta, in the province of Cuneo in Piedmont.
“The discovery in the Ambria Valley is also an effect of climate change,” said Doriano Codega, president of the Valtellina Orobie Natural Park. “The special thing was the altitude – these remains were found at very high levels and were very well preserved. This is an area that has been subject to landslides, so there have also been rock breaks that have exposed these fossils. This is a very important paleontological discovery.”
Some of the remains were recently brought to Milan and displayed at the natural history museum this week. Research will continue at the site, experts said.
Steffensen, whose discovery became known as “Rock Zero”, said: “I feel very proud, especially to have made a small contribution to science.”
