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The first purpose-built museum in Latin America, and something of a relic in itself, the Museo de Ciencias Naturales (daily: winter 10am-6pm; summer 10am-7pm; $3) is a real treat for anyone with a fondness for old-fashioned museums. Curatorial policy, whereby each room is more or less autonomously organized, and a chronic shortage of funds make the museum somewhat patchy, but its highlights, together with its general ambience, are sufficient to make it well worth a visit. The beautiful circular entrance hall , into which light filters through a glass dome, is hung with wonderfully old-fashioned oil paintings of animals such as the extinct mastodon, a huge elephant-like mammal. The first of the museum's 21 rooms, all chronologically ordered, lies immediately to the right of the entrance hall. The first section is devoted to rocks and minerals , including an example of a fossilized araucaria trunk from a petrified forest in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz. The palaeontological section which follows contains a reproduction of the fossilized remains of the largest spider ever found: named the Megarachne Servinei Hunicken, the fifty-centimetre-long arachnid was found in Bajo de Veliz in San Luis Province and is some 290 million years old. There is also a reproduction of a diplodocus skeleton, donated to the museum in 1912 by the North American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie; the unusually complete original is housed in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. In the same room, you'll find the original skeleton of a neuquensaurus, or titanosaurus, a herbivorous dinosaur common in the north of Patagonia towards the end of the Cretaceous Period. Room VI is dedicated to the beginnings of the Cenozoic Period , also known as the Age of Mammals, which extend from around 65 million years ago to the present day. It houses the museum's most important collection: the megafauna, a group of giant herbivorous mammals which evolved in South America at the time when the region was separated from the other continents. The room's impressive collection of skeletons includes the gliptodon, forerunner of today's armadillos; the enormous megatherium, largest of the megafauna which, when standing upright on its powerful two hind legs, would have reached almost double its already impressive six metres; the toxodon, somewhat similar to the hippopotamus, though unrelated; and the camel-like macrauchenia. The reconnection of North and South America began approximately three million years ago, allowing an interchange of species via the Panama isthmus. Both smaller and more successful, the North American fauna, which included the predatory sabre-toothed tiger, were the clear beneficiaries of the interchange and their incursion into South America, together with the arrival of man from the same direction, some 12,000 years ago, appears to have been a major factor in the extinction of the megafauna. The Latin American Archaeology section is to be found upstairs along with the collection of objects from the northwest of Argentina. The first room to the left of the stairs has a large collection of ceramics, mostly from the pre-Columbian cultures of the Peruvian region: including a fine collection of brightly coloured Nazca pottery. In the second room the most notable pieces are the so-called suplicantes from the Condorhuasi-Alamito culture that thrived in Central Catamarca between about 200 and 500AD. These fascinating stone sculptures combine animal and human-like elements with more abstract details and represent fantastic, stylized beings. Their exact use is unknown, although it is thought that they had some kind of ceremonial or ritual function - perhaps being used for some kind of funerary practice, since the upturned faces are similar to those of the corpses found in funerary urns. Highly sophisticated and unique to the Condorhuasi, the suplicantes are among the most valuable pieces in the museum's collection. Guided tours of the museum, well worth following if you have a reasonable grasp of Spanish, are available free of charge. It is possible to arrange guided tours in English, though you need to give considerable notice (two weeks) and will have to pay around $8 per person.
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