La Plata Museum
Established | 1888 |
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Location | La Plata, Argentina |
Coordinates | 34°54′32″S 57°56′07″W / 34.9090°S 57.9354°W |
Visitors | 400,000 |
Director | Analía Lanteri |
Website | Official website |
The La Plata Museum (Spanish: Museo de La Plata) is a natural history museum in La Plata, Argentina. It is part of the Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo (Natural Sciences School) of the National University of La Plata.
The building, 135 meters (443 feet) long, today houses 3 million fossils and relics (including 44,000 botanical items), an amphitheatre opened in 1992, and a 58,000-volume library, serving over 400 university researchers.[1] Around 400,000 visitors (8% of whom are from outside Argentina) pass through its doors yearly, including a thousand visiting researchers.
History
Childhood excursions with his father and older brother led the 14-year-old Francisco Moreno to mount a display of his growing collection of anthropological, fossil and bone findings at his family's Buenos Aires home in 1866, unwittingly laying the foundations for the future La Plata Museum.
Moreno spent the time between 1873 and 1877 exploring then-remote and largely unmapped
Internationally respected naturalists such as
The La Plata Museum was inaugurated on November 19, 1888 (the sixth anniversary of the city's founding). As his collections were the core of the museum, Moreno was appointed its first director.[2] As director, Moreno sacked Florentino Ameghino in 1888 ,even denying him entry to the museum. In the process of being sacked Ameghino kept part of a fossil collection (gathered by his brother Carlos Ameghino in Santa Cruz Province on behalf of the museum) to complete its description.[3] Florentino Ameghino's friend Santiago Roth was another early contributor to the museum's paleontological collection. Moreno named Roth as head of the Paleontology Department of the museum in 1895.[4]
From the beginning the museum's collections drew the attention of the world's anthropological community, attracting numerous visiting international scholars. It earned the American Alliance of Museums' accreditation, as well as plaudits from one of the United States' most prestigious naturalists at the time, Henry Augustus Ward, who deemed the museum to be the fourth most important of its kind in the world.[5]
Collection and exhibits
The Museo de La Plata has around 3 million items in its collection, though only a small part of these are on display. The museum's reputation comes in large part from its collection of large mammal fossils from the third and fourth periods of the Cenozoic Era, found in the Pampas region of northern Argentina.
Argentine
The museum may have modernized its exhibits and added technological mediums, but it still maintains an osteological exhibit with the same characteristics, criteria and concepts that it had near the beginning of the twentieth century. Along with this, the pathway through the museum maintains the original concept of a tour through a timeline of evolutionary history. This is in accordance with the dominant ideas of the scientific community near the end of the nineteenth century.[6]
Egyptian Exhibit
Although the museum houses primarily South American themed exhibits, there is also an Egyptian exhibit that shows the reconstruction of the
Gallery
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Bust of Francisco Moreno in atrium
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Hall of Comparative Osteology
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Recuay sculpture
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Ocean life exhibit
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Cast of Diplodocus skeleton
References
- ^ "El Museo de Ciencias Naturales es el primero de su tipo que está en Google Arts & Culture". 0221 (in Spanish). 2022-12-04. Retrieved 2023-12-02.
- ^ a b Moreno, Francisco. "Two Prehistoric Skulls Brought Back from the Rio Negro". Retrieved 5 May 2012.
- ^ Fernicola, Juan Carlos (2011). "Implicancias del conflicto Ameghino-Moreno sobre la colección de mamíferos fósiles realizada por Carlos Ameghino en su primera exploración al río Santa Cruz, Argentina". Revista del Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales (in Spanish). 13 (1). Retrieved 16 January 2016.
- ^ Weigelt, Gertrud: Santiago Roth 1850-1924. Ein Berner als wissenschaftlicher Pionier in Südamerika, Berner Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Heimatkunde, Paul Haupt Bern, 1951/1, pp. 19–39
- ^ Museo de La Plata: Aquí quedo atrapada la prehistoria. Argentine Information Secretariat, 1981.
- ISBN 978-9774247774.
- ^ Vercoutter, Jean (1962). "Preliminary report on the excavations at Aksha by the Franco-Argentine archaeological expedition, 1961". Kush: Journal of the Sudan Antiquities Service. 10: 109.
- ^ Teruggi, Mario (1988). Museo de La Plata, 1888–1988: una centuria de honra (in Spanish). La Plata, Argentina: Fundacin Museo de La Plata Francisco Pascasio Moreno. p. 80.
External links
- Official website
- El Día: Una vigencia de 130 años (in Spanish)