The fossil site of Cerdas, Bolivia, is located on the high, flat plateau in the middle of the Andes Mountains known as the Altiplano. This makes it a challenging place to do fieldwork. The fossil-producing beds range in elevation from about 12,500 to 13,000 feet (3,800 to 4,000 m), which means the air is thin and […]
Chucal is located in the Altiplano (high plateau) of northern Chile at an elevation nearly 4,500 m. As far as we are aware, it is the highest vertebrate fossil locality in the western hemisphere. It is also among the highest vertebrate fossil sites in the world. The area was at a much lower elevation when its fossils were […]
The fossil site of Quebrada Honda is located in the far south of Bolivia, about 40 miles (60 km) southwest of the city of Tarija. It sits at an elevation of about 11,500 feet (3,500 m) in the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes, the mountains that form the eastern border the Altiplano. The fossil-preserving rocks […]
The fossil site of Cerdas, Bolivia, is located on the high, flat plateau in the middle of the Andes Mountains known as the Altiplano. This makes it a challenging place to do fieldwork. The fossil-producing beds range in elevation from about 12,500 to 13,000 feet (3,800 to 4,000 m), which means the air is thin and […]
A recent area of focus in terms of fieldwork has been the fantastic sequence of strata in the Laguna del Laja area of Chile. These rocks, which are set against a backdrop of a beautiful lake and a picturesque volcano, preserve a diverse array of mammal fossils. We have collected several hundred specimens from the […]
Perhaps the most important of our Chilean localities is Tinguiririca, which is located in central Chile near the town of Termas del Flaco. In the transition between the warm, equitable climate of the Eocene Epoch (54.8 to 33.7 million years ago) and the cooler climate of the Oligocene Epoch (33.7 to 23.8 mya), numerous ‘archaic’ […]
Other Central Chilean Localities
Many of the other fossils we have discovered in Chile come from a variety of localities in the central part of the country. All of these sites apparently sample the Abanico Formation, a group of rocks that was deposited mainly between about 40 million and 15 million years ago. This particular formation tends to preserve specimens in great […]
I am interested in the extinct mammals of Peru for many of the same reasons I am interested in the extinct mammals of Bolivia. Therefore, I jumped at the opportunity to collaborate with a French and Peruvian research team led by Pierre-Olivier Antoine on a project searching for mammal fossils in the eastern part of […]