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.
Holotypes of the Southern Hemisphere
The museum's international reputation is built on its extensive fossil collections from the Cenozoic Era, particularly the massive mammals that roamed the Pampas. The collection of glyptodonts—giant armored relatives of armadillos—is one of the most important in the world. Skeletons of Megatherium (giant ground sloths) and Toxodon (a large hippo-like hoofed mammal) are staples of the exhibits. The first dinosaur ever described in Argentina, Argyrosaurus superbus, is represented by large femora housed in the museum.
The museum is the repository for numerous holotypes, the specific specimens upon which a new species is named. It holds Antarctica's largest collection of fossil vertebrates, including 22 holotypes from that continent. Among these are the small ornithopod dinosaur Trinisaura santamartaensis, which was about 1.5 meters long, and the elasmosaurid plesiosaur Vegasaurus. The Antarctic collection, started in 1978, contains over 32,000 specimens, including fossils of mosasaurs, turtles, and early mammals. While a famous cast of Diplodocus carnegii stands in one hall (a gift from Andrew Carnegie in 1912), it is accompanied by original femora of the titanosaur Antarctosaurus, found in Patagonia.