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Teresa Manera and her team made two key discoveries in 2005.
“One was finding hair traces in the inward sides of Megatherium
footprints”, confirming that “this huge ground sloth
had a hairy coat”. The second was finding “two isolated
blocks of sedimentary rock with a human footprint in each”.
The location of these human prints at a different level, however,
makes it impossible to be certain that humans and megafauna
(large prehistoric animals) actually lived together. |
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Since she and her husband discovered the spectacularly rich
site in 1986, Manera has been racing against not only the elements
and rising sea levels, but also tourists, developers and a lumbering
bureaucracy. However, Manera’s work was given a boost
when the Senate of the state of Buenos Aires approved a bill
making the Pehuen Co site a geological and palaeontological
reserve. This is a major victory in preventing damage caused
by tourists driving vehicles along this section of the coast. |
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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. |
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Manera and her team have 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.
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