Footsteps in the sands of time
Published in 2006
Time and tide, it is said, wait for no one. But at Pehuen Co on Argentina’s blustery Atlantic coast, Rolex Laureate and palaeontologist Teresa Manera de Bianco is holding both at bay.
Impression by impression, the shifting beach sands are unveiling traces of a lost world from 12,000 years ago, when giant animals roamed the continents freely alongside early humans.
Manera reports that she and her team made “two exciting discoveries” in 2005: “One discovery was finding hair traces in the inward sides of some Megatherium footprints. This has allowed us to confirm that this huge ground sloth had a hairy coat. Our second discovery was of two isolated blocks of sedimentary rock with a human footprint in each.
“Although the sediment is the same as that in which we found the megafauna [large prehistoric animals], we still can’t say for certain they lived together as we don’t find them associated in situ at the same level.”
Since she and her husband discovered in 1986 the spectacularly rich site of fossilised trackways of animals and birds, Manera has been racing the clock in a marathon contest against not only the elements and rising sea levels, but also against heedless tourists, developers and a lumbering bureaucracy that has taken its time about protecting this national treasure.
However, in November, Manera’s work was given another boost when the Senate of the state of Buenos Aires approved a bill making the Pehuen Co site a geological and palaeontological reserve, a major step to preventing the damage caused by tourists driving vehicles along this section of the coast.
To save the precious footprints for posterity, Manera and her colleagues have embarked on an urgent campaign to cast as many of the prints as possible and preserve them in the Charles Darwin Municipal Natural Science Museum, which she helped establish, in Punta Alta.
The team has so far taken casts from the tracks of five different mammals and two birds, almost a third of the species identified at Pehuen Co. But however rich and extensive the site, she estimates that less than 1 per cent of its total area has so far been preserved in this fashion – although the aim is not to preserve the entire site, only its representative species.
Julian Cribb
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- Contact Information
Dr Teresa Manera de Bianco
Rosales 456
8109 Punta Alta
Provincia de Buenos Aires
Argentina
