A Collection Born from Patagonia
The La Plata Museum originated with the personal collection of its founder and first director, Francisco Pascasio Moreno. An explorer and naturalist, Moreno gathered thousands of fossils and artifacts during his expeditions through Patagonia in the 1870s. These items, initially forming the Buenos Aires Archaeological and Anthropological Museum in 1877, became the core of the new La Plata Museum when it was established in 1884. The collection today contains around three million individual items.
The museum building itself is a product of 19th-century scientific thought. Its neoclassical design is laid out as a large ellipse, a shape chosen by Moreno to represent the path of evolution. The tour through its 20 permanent exhibition rooms was intended to guide visitors on a path from the origin of the universe to the development of human cultures. The building houses a 58,000-volume library and supports over 400 university researchers. Among its most significant holdings are the paleontological collections amassed by naturalist Florentino Ameghino, who proposed that early humans coexisted with extinct megafauna in the Pampas. Ameghino's work, based on bones showing potential tool marks found alongside megafauna fossils, was central to early discussions about human antiquity in South America.