Today, my wife and I took our three-year-old grandson to visit the Buenos Aires National Natural Sciences Museum to see fossils, dinosaur and megafaunal bones, and more (insects, birds, snakes, turtles, mammals, etc.). We had a great time, the boy loved it, and so did we.
I hadn't been there for some time, and rediscovered the awe of seeing the large glyptodon "shells" (armadillo-like mammals the size of a VW beetle), the amazing canines of sabre-tooth cats, and the 3 meter tall (10 ft) short-snouted bear that lived in the Pampas and Patagonia with the first paleoindians. The museum also houses remains of South American native horses, toxodons, mammoths, terror birds and more.
The "Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales Bernaridno Rivadavia" (The Bernardino Rivadavia Argentine Natural Sciences Museum) is named after Argentina's first president from 1826 to 1827, when he was deposed and the country split up into a loose confederation of provinces governed by local warlords. He promoted the creation of a museum back in 1812, and managed to inaugurate it in 1826.
Argentina fell under the sway of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the strongman of Buenos Aires province from 1829 onwards, until he was overthrown in 1852, and the country reunited under a Constitution modelled after the American one in 1853. The museum survived Rosas' neglect and flourished under the guidance of Hermann Burmeister, a German botanist, zoologist and scholar (who, by the way, was a critic of Darwin's Natural Selection theory of evolution). Burmeister suffered serious injuries at the museum in 1892, falling from a ladder onto a glass display cabinet at the age of 85. He resigned his post in the museum, and died shortly after.
In 1902 Florentino Ameghino was appointed director, and held the post until his death in 1911. He was a renowned fossil collector during the late 1800s and early 1900s, who was involved in several controversial discoveries, some of which involved Patagonian creatures.
The museum is among the most important ones in Argentina, and it is located about 4.5 km from downtown Buenos Aires, housed in a building erected in 1937.
I took some pictures, two of which I am sharing below.
Above is a skull found in Buenos Aires (see my post on it) during the construction of its port in 1896, and described by Ameghino in 1909 as the Diprothomo platensis, a "man from the Tertiary Period". A daring theory that was criticized by those who favored an Old World origin for mankind during the Holocene, who entered America via Bering around 13,000 years ago at the very earliest.
Below is a picture I took of the Mylodon hide with its bone ossicles, on display in the museum. The discovery of the mylodon hide, with hair and a "fresh" appearance, together with dung caused quite an uproar in 1899. Ameghino was also involved as he stated that one had been seen alive and shot at in Patagonia in 1890, and that the natives told stories about hunting a mysterious creature, the iemisch, which Ameghino said was in fact a mylodon.
It was fun to see these specimens of the lost megafauna, and also thought provoking as it shows how dynamic ecosystems are. A whole set of animals, prey and predators died out (or was killed by the Paleoindians), and a new group filled the empty niches. Climate change played its part too. Those were well adapted creatures who had lived for thousands of years in harmony with their surroundings, and all of a sudden they vanished. Similar thoughts about the dinosaurs, who were the top animals on a planetary scale for hundreds of millions of years.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
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