Qualla: Paleontological Sites of Santa Maria

Paleontological Sites of Santa Maria: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arlei antunes, CC BY-SA 4.0. Some of the first dinosaurs to walk the Earth left their bones in the red mudstone beneath Santa Maria. Long before this corner of southern Brazil became a city of universities and cattle highways, it was a hot floodplain at the edge of the supercontinent Pangaea, crawling with creatures that science would not name for another 230 million years. Then, in 1901, the first fossils surfaced from the ground near the Cerrito hill, and a quiet inland town discovered it was sitting on a graveyard of the deep Triassic.

Image: Arlei antunes | CC BY-SA 4.0

Paleontological Sites of Santa Maria: When Dinosaurs Were New

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sergio kaminski, Public domain. The rock here belongs to the Santa Maria and Caturrita formations, laid down in the Late Triassic roughly 233 to 225 million years ago. This was the dawn of the age of dinosaurs, when the group was still small, fast, and far from dominant. The plains teemed instead with stocky, b...

Image: Sergio kaminski | Public domain

Paleontological Sites of Santa Maria: The Southern Cross Lizard

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ricardo630, CC BY-SA 4.0. From these beds came the first dinosaur ever named from Brazil: Staurikosaurus, the "Southern Cross lizard," christened for the constellation that hangs over the southern sky. It was a slender, two-legged predator barely longer than a person is tall, sprinting through the underbr...

Image: Ricardo630 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Paleontological Sites of Santa Maria: A City Built on Bones

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ricardo630, CC BY-SA 4.0. More than twenty fossil sites pepper the municipality, clustered around the Cerrito hill where highways BR-287, BR-158 and RS-509 now braid together. The most storied of them carry names like Sanga da Alemoa and Arroio Cancela, ravines where erosion keeps peeling back the layers ...

Image: Ricardo630 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Paleontological Sites of Santa Maria: Where to Stand Among the Ages

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sergio kaminski, Public domain. The fossils themselves are fragile and buried, but the discoveries surface in town. The Vicente Pallotti museum and the Gama d'Eca educational museum both hold specimens drawn from the surrounding earth, letting visitors come face to face with skulls that predate the dinosaurs' r...

Image: Sergio kaminski | Public domain