Punta Loma. We were parked out on the end of an 850 yard pier.
Puerto Madryn, named for Welsh settlers, is in the Chubut area named by Indians in Patagonia named by Spaniards and toured by both Charles Darwin and Butch Cassidy. Not bad for a quiet backwater in the semidesert plains of southern Argentina.
Their lifesize titanosaur statue
It’s a most interesting place. Our tour guide seemed obsessed with how much everything costs. I don’t really blame her. With Argentina’s political problems, our dollar, which once bought one Argentinian peso, now buys 60. And this wild inflation has hit the poor areas hardest.
An hour’s drive north of Puerto Madryn brings you to the little burg of Trelew. And there is a wonderful museum. El Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio, MEF. It is obvious they didn’t have much money to work with, but every dollar shines. They go from present to past to very past, so the walk-through begins with a diorama of the paleo Indians right after the glaciation. The museum then walks you back into the Cambrian using fossils found in Argentina. And they aren’t quite the same as ours.
Archaeopteryx. Our friend dressed in barred Plymouth Rock feathers.
Beyond the Indians, a Pleistocene marsupial sabre-tooth “cat” that can open its jaws 180° is harassing an early horse and a hippo ancestor. Before them were other fossils not too familiar to us. The general groups—Toxodonts, for example—are there, but they look weird. As you move on you enter the Cretaceous and Argentina has quite a nice collection of Cretaceous stuff. They are so supremely proud that they have the biggest dinosaur in the world, one of the titanosaur sauropods, that they created a full-size model of it. It’s out in the middle of nowhere and you can park and take pictures.
Super spine. Extravagant neural processes.
They did a lovely job with their Permian display. They call the synapsids reptiles, but that is but a linguistic nit. They have an ammonite from the Ordovician nearly four feet in diameter, eurypterids, a five-inch long trilobite, and a lot of other wow stuff. Out in the atrium they give you biographical panels of the major South American paleontologists and info on how fossils form.
Chicken Feathers. Their solution when it became apparent that dinosaurs are feathered.
One little kink: When it became clear that dinosaurs were feathered, the museum did not replace their naked dino sculptures in the atrium. They glued chicken feathers on the smaller ones like Archaeopteryx (Barred Plymouth Rock feathers, to be exact), and rhea feathers on the raptors. Now they need a sign: “No chickens were injured in the making of this museum.”
The same tour took us to Punta Loma, a sea lion rookery south of town. The viewing area is around 70 ft up at the top of a cliff. You look down upon a BBC Nature program scene of bulls, a few cows, the pods of pups, and assorted gulls and cormorants. It is nesting season for the cormorants, and they cling to tiny ledges on the sandstone cliff face. Shucks, I remember Walt Disney’s Seal Island, the pioneering True Life adventure that still holds water today.
Following the maxim that music soothes the savage beast, the man directing worship last Sunday asked us to sing extra loud in hopes of soothing the savage Antarctic currents. We’ll see how that went in a few days.
God bless you all.
Cave and beach. Sea lion rockery.
Cormorant rookery.
Patagonia. The semi-desert has atriplex and caliche.