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As you read this story, you will learn the following:
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Climbers discovered strange tracks in the limestone bed and took photos for paleontologists to study.
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When paleontologists realized what the tracks might mean, they took more footage and compared it to extinct and living marine reptiles.
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It is now believed that the marks were left by a group of ancient turtles that were scared away by a sudden earthquake.
83 million years ago, the Cònero Riviera on Italy’s east coast was a haven for Cretaceous underwater marine reptiles and fish, including the ancestors of modern sea turtles. But one day, an ominous rumble from below sends them scattering, their frantic flipper marks frozen in time.
In the spring of 2019, when climbers climbed the steep limestone slopes of Mount Conero, they discovered what appeared to be trampled footprints embedded in the rock surface. The marks looked similar to fossils that paleontologist Luca Natali had found on a nearby rock a few months earlier—marks left by a life form, but not the remains of the life form itself. Natalie later attributed the traces to extinct marine reptiles sea centipede, Considered a type of pliosaur.
When climbers brought digital photos of their finds to paleontologist Alessandro Montanari of the Cordigioco Geological Observatory, he knew they were worth pursuing. The transparent cliffs where the footprints are located on La Villa Beach are more than 328 feet (100 meters) above sea level, but that didn’t stop Montanari and his team of researchers. They were able to enter Conero Regional Park (which was closed to the public due to the rockfall) to survey the area on foot and sent a drone to capture more panoramic images from above.
“We speculate that these footprints may have been left by a group of medium-sized marine vertebrates paddling southwest on the soft pelagic seafloor and were preserved on soft mud sediments because they were immediately buried and sealed beneath calcareous turbidites,” Montanari said in a recent study published in the journal Nature. Cretaceous Research.
What creature leaves so many traces as it travels? Well, during the late Cretaceous, the only vertebrates living near the ocean floor were fish and reptiles. While the bones of many marine species have been found preserved in limestone that was once underwater, nothing has surfaced bearing the imprints of their feet, fins or oars. These footprints don’t last long on the seafloor in seeping sediments—they’re easily erased by currents or washed away by deep-ocean currents.
Since fish don’t use their fins to paddle across the sand, Montanari and his team needed to consider the types of marine reptiles that were around during that time period. They believe the tracks could be from mosasaurs, plesiosaurs or extinct sea turtles Protolithaceaealthough no fossilized remains of these turtles or plesiosaurs have been found in the area. Despite the lack of fossil evidence, researchers continue to investigate every avenue, departing from previous reports of tracks left by Triassic dinosaurs and sea turtles that lived in the late Pleistocene.
While ancient sea turtles and plesiosaurs were mostly solitary creatures, females of most living sea turtle species migrate long distances and lay eggs in large groups on tropical beaches. In addition, Hawaiian green sea turtles (turtle) and tortoiseshell (Eretmochelys imbricata) They are known to inhabit shallow reefs, sometimes swimming close to the bottom and brushing the sand with their front fins. These turtles live in an environment similar to what one imagines the beaches of Monte Cònero and La Vela would have been tens of millions of years ago.
“The ubiquity of sea turtle species in these environments leads us to speculate that the numerous trace fossils in the La Villa Plate represent large-scale migrations of large numbers of these animals,” Montanari said. He thinks these ancient creatures may have been foraging for food when frightened. “A sudden earthquake triggered a stampede toward the high seas.”
As the already panicked turtles tried to escape, some came so close to the seafloor that they left a trail of flippers behind them. The earthquake released calcite flow turbidites (coarse-grained sediments that become limestone when mixed with fine-grained sediments), which buried and preserved soft carbonate sediments and records of their massive sea turtle migrations. The seismic activity at this time coincides with a period of climate change known as the Early Campania Event, which is thought to have been triggered by an asteroid impact.
For any rock climber who may be exploring places with known fossil beds, it may be worthwhile to carry some sort of camera with you. It could lead to the discovery of something that has been waiting for tens or even hundreds of millions of years.
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