In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ix P Preface & Acknowledgments The first reports, during the late 1700s and early 1800s, of the fossil remains of South America’s 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 Río de la Plata, several of whom (such as the Ameghinos) took on the void created by Darwin’s return to England and restarted the study of the South American fossil mammals with renewed enthusiasm. Such was x Preface and Acknowledgments their influence that it even affected the excited atmosphere of the newly born city of La Plata, which inspired an illustration that adorns one of the entrances of the División Paleontología de Vertebrados of the Museo de La Plata. As explained in Chapter 8, it was conceived at the end of the nineteenth century, just after the city’s founding, as an artist’s rendition of a plan to embellish the gardens between the museum and the neighboring zoo, two of the proud city’s 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. Despite such an early and auspicious beginning, the study and our understanding of South America’s extinct mammals has generally lagged behind those from most other continents. In part this is certainly due to their distinctness, generally leading scientists to either consider them too odd to expend much energy on, or regard them as somewhat inferior variants of more typical mammals, as was once done for dinosaurs. In accepting such views, the past was condemned to be more or less like the present and the magnificent mammals of South America relegated to being antiquated curiosities of “better” and “more modern” mammalian designs. In this book we endeavor to reveal that such views are erroneous. Despite their differences and the fact that no living analogues exist for many native South American mammals, thus making comparisons difficult, we show that these mammals and the environments in which they lived and evolved were likely not merely slight variations of those that exist today. Their study is thus entirely worth the...

Share