SCIENCE-ARGENTINA: Tiny Mammal the Star of a Spectacular Find

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Feb 14 2001 (IPS) - The discovery of a “Jurassic park” in southern Argentina caused an impact Wednesday when a local paper published the photo of the petrified spinal column of an eight-metre dinosaur. Ironically, however, experts say the biggest find was the fossil of a tiny mammal that measured just 15 cms.

“That is the most important novelty of this discovery, because it is the first mammal of that antiquity to be found in South America, and among the very few found anywhere in the world,” paleontologist José Bonaparte, the head of vertebrate studies at Argentina’s National Museum of Natural Sciences, told IPS.

The discovery – reported Wednesday by the local daily La Nación – was made by a group of scientists with the Paleontological Museum of Trelew in the Campamento Los Adobes, in the province of Chubut, some 2,000 kms southwest of Buenos Aires.

Among the main findings was the semi-buried fossil of a Sauropod, a dinosaur that lived in the Middle Jurassic period, around 165 million years ago. Also found nearby were the fossils of Pterodactyls – flying reptiles – turtles, amphibians and the tiny ancient mammal.

Although the newspaper presented the find as if it involved the first discovery of fossils dating to the Jurassic period – 208 to 146 million years ago – the most exciting aspect was really the mammal, whose skull measures around 2.5 cms, said Bonaparte.

During expeditions carried out from 1976 to 1985, Bonaparte and his colleagues found the fossils of 11 species of Sauropods and two Teropods – short-armed carnivorous bipeds – from the Jurassic period. All of the findings were published, and some of the fossils are on display in the Museum of Natural Sciences.

The paleontologist pointed out that during the time dinosaurs roamed the earth, the only mammals to evolve were the size of a mouse, until the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago.

The new find thus comes on top of previous ones by Bonaparte, as well as the discovery of fossils dating to the Cretaceous period – 140 to 65 million years ago – such as the Gigantosaurus found in 1993 by Rubén Carolini in the southwestern province of Neuquén – the biggest meat-eating dinosaur ever found.

Carolini and his team recovered 70 percent of the fossils of the enormous dinosaur, which measured around 14 metres and had a 1.8-metre skull. The Gigantosaurus, which lived around 100 million years ago, is even bigger than the well-known Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Another major breakthrough in the southern region of Patagonia – which encompasses the provinces of Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz and Ushuaia – was the “Unenlagia comahuensis”, whose remains were found by another Argentine paleontologist, Fernando Novas, in 1997.

The Unenlagia – in the tongue of the local Mapuche Indians, “unen” means “almost” and “lagia” means “bird – is seen as the missing link between dinosaurs and birds. It was a swift- running dinosaur with a bone structure like that of the ostrich, similar to the Velociraptor, which measured 2.3 metres and lived 80 million years ago.

Bonaparte said it was too bad that in the current expedition, headed by German paleontologist Oliver Ruhut, scientists were called in from the United States to carry out tasks that could have been done by local scientists with years of experience.

“There are scientists here who have dedicated their lives to studying mammals from the Jurassic period, and now that we have found a fossil, instead of calling on them, experts from abroad were called in,” said the paleontologist.

“That also jibes with the fact that previous finds from the Jurassic period, discovered by Argentinians, were hardly even mentioned,” he added.

In Argentina, scientific researchers work with little official support, but their academic training is internationally respected. Their discoveries are published in scientific journals, and they are involved in frequent exchanges with universities worldwide.

Meanwhile, prominent local scientists like Bonaparte and Novas earn salaries of just 1,500 dollars a month.

Novas said the equipment needed to do field research was very costly, and that no funds were allotted for it, which meant local researchers frequently have to work with financing from abroad.

“Argentina is extremely rich in paleontology because there are many fossils, as well as areas with no vegetation, which facilitates our work. And there is science – in other words, very well-trained people who are internationally recognised,” he said.

Bonaparte underlined, however, that the all-too-familiar lack of official backing could mean that all of the experience accumulated by Argentine researchers in the ongoing search for fossils could come to naught, despite finds of the magnitude – although not the size – of the tiny ancient mammal found in Chubut.