Science|More Than 2,000 Dinosaur Footprints Are Found in the Italian Alps

A 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 Tuesday consists of thousands of fossilized 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.

Mr. 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 meters 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.”

The tracks are thought to have been made by prosauropods, plant-eating dinosaurs with long necks from the late stages of the Triassic Period who are ancestors of the brontosaurus.

Mr. Della Ferrera believed he could well have seen and photographed the site before without realizing what it was. “I probably saw them in the past, and even took some photographs, but then I threw them away because at the time I was concentrated on taking beautiful pictures for competitions and other projects,” he said in an interview.