CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The fossils of the so-called Santacrucian Mammal Age (Early?Middle Miocene) constitute the most abundant and complete record of a vertebrate fauna in Patagonia during the Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum (MMCO) and prior to the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI). To explore the effects of MMCO on the Santacrucian fauna, in 2003 we established a paleoecology research program, the first stage of which was reflected in the publication in 2012 of the volume Early Miocene Paleobiology in Patagonia. High-Latitude Paleocommunities of the Santa Cruz Formation (S.F. Vizcaíno, R.F. Kay and M.S. Bargo, Eds.; Cambridge University Press). That work focused on the outcrops of the Santa Cruz Formation of the Atlantic coast where the fossils are most abundant and best preserved. We wished then to refine the chronological and faunal correlations of the exposures of this formation in other areas in the Province of Santa Cruz, before extending our paleoecological approach in those outcrops. Our first step was to recollect localities in the Santa Cruz Formation along the Río Santa Cruz, the first in Patagonia formally explored from a paleontological perspective during the second half of the 19th century. The Río Santa Cruz fossils were seminal for the evolutionary study of the succession of the fossil vertebrate communities of South America during the Miocene in particular, and the Cenozoic in general. The publications of Florentino Ameghino on the Río Santa Cruz fossils, since 1887 and later, strongly marked the focus of vertebrate paleontology in South America. Often without a critical consideration of the context of Ameghino?s relationships with other personalities of his time in the field of paleontology and its consequences in the quality of information that remained available for further studies.

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