Expediciones paleontológicas durante los siglos XIX y XX a la Formación Santa Cruz (Mioceno Inferior, Patagonia) y destino de los fósiles

VIZCAÍNO, S. F.; BARGO, M. S.; FERNICOLA, J. C.

III Congreso Argentino de Historia de la Geología

Mundo Gráfico Salta Editorial

Lugar: Salta; Año: 2013; p. 231 - 246

Paleontological expeditions during the XIX and XX centuries to the Santa Cruz Formation (Lower Miocene, Patagonia) and the fate of its fossils. Over the past 150 years, the Santa Cruz Formation (Lower Miocene, Patagonia) has yielded many nearly complete and well-preserved fossils, mainly of mammals. On the basis of its lithology and fossil content, Florentino Ameghino described his «Piso Santacruzeño». Its contained fauna, highly distinct from those known from other continents, was interpreted by Ameghino as being older than it is, and this led him to conclude that many extant mammalian lineages originated in South America. The combination of the quality of the fossil record and the intellectual challenge of Ameghino?s ideas sparked strong interest from major academic centers in the world to obtain Santacrucian fossils for their collections and exhibitions. During the last decade of the nineteenth and the first few of the twentieth centuries several Argentinian and foreign institutions organized expeditions or contracted independent collectors. In this contribution we present a synthesis of the national and foreign expeditions that collected fossils from this formation between 1877 and 1923 and follow the fate of the fossils in theMuseo de La Plata, the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales «B. Rivadavia» and institutions in the United States and Europe. Combined with subsequent collections, more than 10,000 fossil Santacrucian specimens have been recovered over nearly a century and a half. Parts of these collections were used in exchanges among scientists and institutions, so that in many cases the current repository does not correspond to the institutions in which they were originally housed.