Qualla: Ischigualasto Provincial Park

Ischigualasto Provincial Park: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A geologist came here in the 1940s prospecting for coal and instead sent home the bones of a creature no one had seen. From those samples, in 1943, Dr. Angel Cabrera of the University of La Plata described Exaeretodon, the first ancient mammal relative ever found in the place. It was only the beginning. This dry basin in the far northeast of Argentina's San Juan Province, a landscape of wind-carved rock and pale clay that the Automobil Club Argentino dubbed the Valle de la Luna, the Valley of the Moon, would turn out to hold one of the richest records of dinosaur origins anywhere on Earth.

Ischigualasto Provincial Park: A Window Into Deep Time

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The rocks here belong to the Ischigualasto Formation, laid down in the Late Triassic, between roughly 231 and 226 million years ago. Walk the badlands and you are walking through layers of that lost world. In the Carnian age, this was no desert at all but a volcanically active fl...

Ischigualasto Provincial Park: The First Dinosaurs

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most of the fossils here are not dinosaurs at all. Beaked reptiles called rhynchosaurs and mammal-like cynodonts dominate the record. But among them are some of the oldest known dinosaurs in the world, and that is what makes Ischigualasto extraordinary. In the early 1990s, paleon...

Ischigualasto Provincial Park: The Hunters Who Found Them

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Science came slowly to this remote ground. The first paleontological notes date to 1930, and by 1941 researchers had identified some seventy species of fossil plants. The breakthrough came in 1958, when Dr. Alfred Sherwood Romer, a Harvard expert on early mammals, walked the badl...

Ischigualasto Provincial Park: Walking the Valley of the Moon

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At about 1,300 meters above sea level, the park sprawls across the western edge of Argentina's Central Sierras, its sparse desert scrub covering only a tenth or so of the ground. The rest is rock, sculpted into otherworldly shapes by water and relentless wind: a formation called ...