Peiró (1859–1911) arrived at a place still called Paineiras and set about making it useful. Lime kilns went up first, then storage sheds for grain. By 1889 the Mogiana Railway Company had pushed its tracks as far as Uberaba, and Peiró saw the obvious move: a local station of his own, from which lime and grain could reach the São Paulo market. He died in 1911 and the station was promptly renamed Cambará, as though the district's memory had already moved on. It had not. In 1924, at the request of the people living there, the name was changed again — to Peirópolis, Peiró's city. The station kept working until 1970, when the limestone ran thin and a fatal accident on the line nearby disrupted services. It closed for good in 1971.

The first fossil surfaced in 1945, during work to realign the railway. It was a thigh bone, identified as belonging to a titanosaur — one of the long-necked sauropods that dominated South America until the very end of the dinosaur era. Word reached the National Department of Mineral Production, which sent the paleontologist Llewellyn Ivor Price to look. Price stayed. In 1946 he turned up a fossilised eggshell fifteen centimetres across, later attributed to a sauropod, and then began excavating in earnest. The material he recovered went to the DNPM's headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, hundreds of kilometres away — a pattern that would eventually become a grievance and then a project.

The rock beneath Peirópolis belongs to the Serra da Galga Formation, part of the Bauru Group, and dates to the Maastrichtian — the last stage of the Cretaceous, the final few million years before the asteroid. What has come out of it reads like an inventory of a lost ecosystem. Three titanosaurs: *Uberabatitan ribeiroi*, *Trigonosaurus pricei* and *Baurutitan britoi*. Three crocodyliforms, land-going relatives of modern crocodiles, in *Uberabasuchus terrificus*, *Peirosaurus tormini* and *Itasuchus jesuinoi*. Two side-necked turtles, *Peiropemys mezzalirai* and *Pricemys caiera*. A frog, *Uberabatrachus carvalhoi*. From vastly younger deposits, the giant ground sloth *Eremotherium laurillardi*. Two of those names honour Price himself. One honours the village.

Through the 1980s, residents and supporters of the science pushed a non-governmental campaign to keep Peirópolis intact as a research site rather than let it be quarried or scattered. The DNPM formally demarcated the area in 1988. Three years later came the payoff: the Llewellyn Ivor Price Paleontological Research Centre and the Museu dos Dinossauros, the Dinosaur Museum, installed in the building of the village's own dead railway station. The line that exposed the first femur now shelters the collection. Federal money was allocated in 2003 for a National Paleontology Network headquarters in the district, but the funding fell through and the project was cancelled. In 2011 the Federal University of Triângulo Mineiro took the remaining facilities over, folding them into the Peirópolis Cultural and Scientific Complex.

Today the research centre and the museum are working institutions rather than monuments — publishing, collaborating with paleontological bodies in Brazil and abroad, and holding more than 1,500 fossils pulled from the ground within a short drive. The exhibitions are pitched at scientists and schoolchildren alike, which in a rural district twenty kilometres out from Uberaba matters more than it sounds. The recognition arrived in March 2024, when UNESCO granted Uberaba Global Geopark status on the strength of thirty-one geosites in the municipality. The branding chosen for it was *Terra de Gigantes* — land of giants. Frederico Peiró would have understood the phrase perfectly, and meant something completely different by it.