Daily Fossil Coast News Roundup - December 20th 2025
- Wayne Munday
- 21 hours ago
- 4 min read
Sip back and explore today’s Fossil Coast Daily News and celebrate two major discoveries. In Stelvio National Park, Italy, palaeontologists are analysing ~20,000 dinosaur footprints preserved on steep dolomite walls, offering fresh behavioural insights into early herbivorous dinosaurs more than 210 million years ago during the Late Triassic. Across the Southern Hemisphere, a potential ancient whale fossil has been uncovered in the rock pools of Ocean Grove Beach, Victoria, Australia, pointing to the region’s rich Miocene marine heritage and the evolutionary story of early cetaceans. These finds, one tracing terrestrial motion and herd behaviour and the other poised to deepen our grasp of early whale evolution, underscore the dynamic interplay of environment, evolution, and fossil preservation over geological time.
New Cretaceous Marine Reptiles in Colombia Expand the Fossil Record
Three new Cretaceous Period marine reptile fossils found in South America
In one of the most compelling discoveries reported today, researchers from the Colombian Geological Survey announced the identification of three marine reptile fossils in Cundinamarca, Santander, and Boyacá the first such records of these groups in South America’s Cretaceous strata. Among the finds are:
Boyacasaurus sumercei, a long-snouted pliosaur with distinct basal skull anatomy, dating to approximately 114 million years ago.
Oneirosaurus caballeroi, a mosasaur from around 89 million years ago.
A large ichthyosaur from the Siquima Riverbed, roughly 110 million years old, representing the first recorded tunosaurian ichthyosaur in Colombia and South America.
These discoveries matter because they fill geographic and stratigraphic gaps in the marine reptile fossil record. Pliosaurs and mosasaurs were apex predators in their respective seas, the former in the mid-Cretaceous and the latter in the Late Cretaceous, while ichthyosaurs dominated earlier marine ecosystems. Finding all three in the same region not only expands paleobiogeographic knowledge across Gondwanan continents but also offers new opportunities to reconstruct Cretaceous ocean ecosystems and predator–prey dynamics in tropical South America.
Triassic Dinosaur Trackways Reveal Herd Dynamics in the Italian Alps
Stelvio’s Vast Trace Fossil Assemblage
Earlier this month, an extraordinary palaeontological site near Stelvio National Park in Italy’s Fraele Valley or Valle di Fraele a stunning high-altitude plateau that has yielded roughly 20,000 dinosaur footprints preserved on near-vertical dolomite walls at ~2,000 m elevation. Scientists attribute the tracks to large, long-necked herbivores, likely early prosauropods, active during the Late Triassic (~210 Ma).
Trace fossils or ichnites capture behavioural data rather than bone anatomy, recording actual interactions between organisms and their substrate. The remarkable density, orientation, and spacing of these prints suggest not only locomotion patterns but synchronised movement consistent with group behaviour. While firm interpretations of social dynamics are always cautious, the scale and coherence of this assembly make it one of the most significant Triassic trace fossil sites globally.
This Alpine discovery highlights how tectonic uplift and subsequent exposure have transformed ancient floodplain muds—originally flat surfaces where dinosaurs walked—into today’s steep rock faces. These sediments lithified into rock and were later tilted during the formation of the Alps, preserving the prints in spectacular detail.
Mystery Whale Fossil Emerges on Australia’s Surf Coast
Ocean Grove Reveals Miocene Marine Heritage
On Ocean Grove Beach a popular, family-friendly surf beach along Australia’s Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria, a large fossilised bone recently emerged from rock pools exposed at low tide and stirred immediate interest among scientists and local fossil enthusiasts. Representatives from Museums Victoria confirmed the find may represent part of a prehistoric whale skeleton, and field teams will return in early 2026 to carefully excavate and document the specimen.
Preliminary assessment places this specimen among the region’s growing catalogue of Miocene marine mammals, a faunal component that has yielded notable taxa including the sharp-toothed early whale Janjucetus dullardi described earlier in 2025 from the same wider coastline. The new find’s precise taxonomic identity, age, and ecological implications await detailed study, but it reinforces the Bellarine and Surf Coast fossil corridor as a vital record of Oligocene-Miocene marine evolution.
The depositional environments here chronicle episodic transgressions and regressions of the ancient Southern Ocean, where seagrass beds, estuaries, and open shelves provided diverse habitats for early cetaceans and other marine vertebrates. Understanding how these communities adapted through climatic and oceanographic shifts sharpens our view of marine mammal evolution.
Why It Matters
These discoveries matter because they push the boundaries of how we understand behaviour, ecology, and evolutionary innovation on Earth. Trace fossils like those in the Alps provide rare evidence of motion and interaction, often elusive in skeletal collections alone. At the same time, new marine mammal fossils help fill gaps in the cetacean lineage, illustrating how whales and their relatives adapted to changing seascapes and climates. Together, these finds remind us that the fossil record is not static it is continuously reshaped by excavation, reinterpretation, and technological advances in imaging and geospatial analysis.
Looking Ahead
As 2025 draws to a close, palaeontologists continue to push the boundaries of discovery. Looking forward, multidisciplinary teams are preparing to document the Alpine footprint site with 3D photogrammetry, drone reconnaissance, and ichnological mapping to better quantify locomotion patterns and landscape use. Meanwhile, the impending 2026 field season at Ocean Grove promises to clarify the whale fossil’s identity and evolutionary context, potentially adding a new chapter to the story of marine mammal diversification in Australia. These efforts exemplify how palaeontology blends cutting-edge methods with public collaboration to reveal Earth’s deep past.
