Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
night, we ate dinner at a local restaurant and went to sleep. We
would not enjoy the luxury of a bed again for about four weeks.
The next day we spent driving, hoping to make it all the way to
Auca Mahuida by nightfall. Despite the long hours in the vehicle, the
sights along the way, especially the birds, were entrancing. El Nino had
brought an unusual amount of rain to the Pampas, which had formed
shallow ponds and lakes along the side of the road that attracted many
waterbirds. Identifying the flamingos, spoonbills, coots, ducks, and var-
ious raptors kept us entertained as the miles rolled by. As we drove far-
ther west, the land grew drier and more rugged. Near Santa Rosa,
about halfway to Auca Mahuida, we drove along enormous ridges that
represented ancient sand dunes deposited by huge sandstorms near
the end of the last Ice Age, ten thousand to twenty thousand years ago.
However, we were on a quest to find older rocks, ones laid down as
South America had split apart from Africa more than 70 million
years ago, when large dinosaurs ruled the continent.
As we stopped for gas in Santa Rosa, we were reminded of just how
small a world we live in. Buying gas at the pump next to ours was
Francois Vuilleumier, a curator in the Ornithology Department at the
American Museum of Natural History, the same department in which
Luis worked. Nattily dressed in duds that would be the envy of any
gaucho, he had been collecting data on the birds of the region for his
research. In fact, a third member of the Ornithology Department was
present. Paul Sweet, who has traveled all over the world to acquire new
specimens for the museum's collection of birds, was accompanying
our expedition as a scientific assistant. Even more bizarre, Francois
had just driven Sara Bertelli, an ornithology graduate student from the
University of Tucuman in northwest Argentina, who is also a student
of Luis's, to Rodolfo's museum so that she could join our expedition
to collect specimens of a primitive bird called the tinamou. Ironically,
scientists go to the field to get away from the responsibilities at the
museum, but as chance would have it, Luis, Paul, and Francois con-
stituted a quorum for an impromptu departmental meeting at a gas
station halfway around the world.
Finally, in the late afternoon, we met Rodolfo Coria and his crew
members at a small town in northwestern Patagonia called Barda del
Medio. From there, we drove the last seventy miles to our field area
as the sun set over the extinct volcano at Auca Mahuida. As darkness
