Manifesto of the South American school of (actualistic) taphonomy

Abstract

When the young Charles Darwin explored the Atlantic coast of southern South America, he was impressed by its fossils —as he wrote in the first paragraph of the Origin of Species (1859)— and the magnitude of its “wide and desolate” plains (Darwin 1839, p. 124). Although his adventures on the Patagonian plains became more famous, Darwin’s first observations were on the Pampas, a flat area that covers parts of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, where the gaucho was lord and master. Since that time, these flat lowlands have been the object of much geological and paleontological research, but there is still much more to discover, especially in the field of taphonomy.