A treasure trove of fossils containing 150 million-year-old bacteria, mosses and insects has been discovered in a remote area of Patagonia, offering a picture of how the region looked in the Jurassic era.
“No other place in the world contains the same amount and diversity of Jurassic fossils,” said Juan Garcia Massini, the geologist leading the excavations for the Regional Centre for Scientific Research and Technology Transfer.
Hot thermal springs covered the ancient microfauna and flora in minerals such as silica, preserving them to a quality rarely seen elsewhere in the world. Delicate plant life was captured almost immediately, sometimes less than a day after it died.
“There are columns of cyanobacteria where you can see the filament as if it were waving in the water,” Mr Garcia Massini said. “You can see the landscape as it appeared in the Jurassic — how thermal waters, lakes and streams as well as plants and other parts of the ecosystem were distributed. You can see how fungi, cyanobacteria and worms moved when they were alive.”
The discoveries were made at a series of sites in the Deseado Massif mountain range in the south of Argentina, an upland area of peaks and lakes. No dinosaur or other vertebrate fossils have yet been found. A 122ft titanosaur, the world’s biggest dinosaur, was discovered in the region two years ago.