Long before the oil and the dinosaurs, there was Carmen Funes. The land here was first crossed in 1876 during the Conquest of the Desert, and among the early settlers was Funes, a frontierswoman known as Pastoverde - green grass. She and her partner, Campos, built a waystation where travelers could rest, welcoming soldiers and the Pehuenche and Mapuche people of the steppe alike before making this their permanent home. Huincul means hills in Mapudungun, and Plaza Huincul - the Plaza of the Hills - grew slowly on that lonely frontier until the day the ground revealed what it had been holding all along.

That day was September 13, 1918, when the state oil company YPF - Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales - brought workers to drill its first oil rig here. The town exploded into life around the wells. A train station opened on November 20, 1921, and a great arch marking the entrance to the YPF camp still stands as a monument to those years. Plaza Huincul became, and remains, an oil-and-gas town, home to a YPF refinery and bound tightly to its twin city, Cutral Co, with which it shares both an economy and, increasingly, a reputation built on dinosaur tourism. It was formally recognized as a municipality on February 1, 1967. Sheep and goat ranching now spread across the surrounding scrub.

In 1987, a farmer named Guillermo Heredia found what he took to be a petrified tree trunk on his land. It was a fibula - the lower leg bone of Argentinosaurus, the largest dinosaur ever identified from substantial remains, an animal estimated at 35 meters long and as much as 75 to 100 tonnes. Six years later came the next revelation. In 1993, an amateur fossil hunter named Ruben Dario Carolini, out exploring in a dune buggy, stumbled across the shin bone of an enormous predator. A team led by paleontologist Rodolfo Coria excavated a remarkably complete skeleton, and in 1995 they named it Giganotosaurus - a meat-eater 12 to 13 meters long, rivaling and perhaps exceeding Tyrannosaurus rex itself.

The desert was not finished. Between 1997 and 2001, Coria and the Canadian paleontologist Phil Currie excavated what they first believed was another Giganotosaurus from the Huincul Formation. The bones told a different story: subtle differences, mostly in the skull, marked them as a close relative. In 2006 the new animal was named Mapusaurus - and crucially, its bones were found jumbled together in numbers, supporting Currie's theory that some giant predators hunted in packs. The image is haunting: not a single lone hunter, but coordinated groups of multi-ton carnivores sweeping across what is now a quiet Patagonian oil town. The town's most famous predator even reached the movies - Giganotosaurus stalked through Jurassic World: Dominion in 2022 as the film's monstrous dinosaur antagonist, carrying the name of a creature first pulled from these dunes onto screens worldwide. Beneath the refineries and the highway, Plaza Huincul remains one of the great hunting grounds in the science of deep time.