De Iuliis Gerardo - Megafauna: giant beasts of Pleistocene South America

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2013 by Richard A. Faria, Sergio F. Vizcano, and Gerardo De Iuliis

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Megafauna : giant beasts of Pleistocene South America / Richard A. Faria, Sergio F. Vizcano, and Gerry De Iuliis.

p. cm. (Life of the past)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-00230-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-253-00719-3 (eb) 1. Mammals, FossilSouth America. 2. PaleobiologySouth America. 3. Geology, StratigraphicPleistocene. I. Faria, Richard A. II. Vizcano, Sergio F. III. De Iuliis, Gerardo, [date]

QE881.M475 2012

569.098dc23

2012017801

1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13

To past and current researchers of South American fossil mammals.

Those of the past are an endless source of inspiration, those still current of intellectual motivation.

To the memory of Mirta Tosar, my mother, who taught me to be bold and love animals as a person, and to Neill Alexander, who encouraged me in the same way as a scientist.

R.A.F.

To the memory of my parents, Eric and Negra, who instilled in me the value of hard work and honesty.

To Susi, Rulo, Leo, Tano, Guille, and Nestor, the people with whom I share every day the joy of doing this job.

S.F.V.

To my family and the memory of my father and father-in-law, whose sacrifices allowed me the luxury of doing what I love.

To Charles Rufus Churcher, who instilled in me the intellectual discipline to carry it out.

G.D.I.

The number of the remains embedded in the grand estuary deposit which forms the Pampas and covers the granitic rocks of Banda Oriental, must be extraordinarily great. I believe a straight line drawn in any direction through the Pampas would cut through some skeleton or bones. Besides those which I found during my short excursions, I heard of many others, and the origin of such names as the stream of the animal, the hill of the giant, is obvious. At other times I heard of the marvellous property of certain rivers, which had the power of changing small bones into large; or, as some maintained, the bones themselves grew. As far as I am aware, not one of these animals perished, as was formerly supposed, in the marshes or muddy river-beds of the present land, but their bones have been exposed by the streams intersecting the subaqueous deposit in which they were originally embedded. We may conclude that the whole area of the Pampas is one wide sepulchre of these extinct gigantic quadrupeds.

Charles R. Darwin, November 26, 1833

The first reports, during the late 1700s and early 1800s, of the fossil remains of South Americas magnificent Pleistocene beasts, so fantastically bizarre, immediately caused a stir among the general public and, in particular, the European scientific community. The first notices of their discovery described them as monsters, firing the imagination and interest of several eminent scientists and politicians, and leading some of them to believe that these great beasts still wandered among the unknown (for Europeans, at any rate) reaches of the New World. The fossils helped usher in a new episode among the fledgling nations of both South and North America, striving then for recognition and validation in the eyes of the established European powers: finally they had something of their own that rivaled the great treasures of the Old World. Eventually, the fossils contributed significantly to the establishment of new scientific institutions and traditions as the New World countries took hold of their destinies and exploration of their territories.

The fossil mammals of both North and South America began to reveal an unimagined chapter in the history of mammals, based as it then was mainly on knowledge unearthed from European deposits, but it was those from South America that were most strikingly different and garnered much of the early attention. Perhaps because of this distinctness, largely as a result of the long, past isolation of South America from other continental landmasses, they played crucial roles in the development of modern biological thought. We may note as examples of their scientific achievements that a South American fossil mammal (Megatherium americanum, a giant fossil sloth) was the first fossil to be formally described and named scientifically, and its skeleton was the first to be mounted in a lifelike pose. The sharp mind of Georges Cuvier, the great French comparative anatomist, forged the concept of extinction (in the modern sense of this word) based on this fossil sloth (as well as on North and South American remains of fossil elephant relatives). Perhaps most significantly, it was the giant sloths, the giant armadillo-like glyptodonts, and the majestic and ponderous toxodonts (among other South American fossil remains) that struck most fervently upon the fertile mind of the young Charles Darwin, both during and after his famous voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, as he worked out his ideas on evolutionary theory.

Despite the relative isolation of the new South American countries, these ideas greatly affected scientists and intellectuals on both sides of the Ro de la Plata, several of whom (such as the Ameghinos) took on the void created by Darwins return to England and restarted the study of the South American fossil mammals with renewed enthusiasm. Such was , it was conceived at the end of the nineteenth century, just after the citys founding, as an artists rendition of a plan to embellish the gardens between the museum and the neighboring zoo, two of the proud citys new jewels. In these gardens, visitors could stroll between the institutions that housed the living and the long dead and have a sense of those extinct beasts, brought back to life in the form of life-sized sculptures.