Some 80 million years ago, an earthquake seemed to have sent a flock of frightened sea turtles scrambling across the seafloor.
Traces of this prehistoric panic were stumbled upon by a group of free climbers in 2019 on a steep slope overlooking the Adriatic Sea, which the public is typically prohibited from accessing due to rockfalls. They noticed a chunk of rock covered with marks that looked like footprints and snapped some photos. One of the climbers later showed these to Paolo Sandroni, a geologist (and fellow free climber) at the Marche region’s Multi-Risk Functional Center in Italy.
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