Qualla: Plaza Huincul

Plaza Huincul: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Drill down beneath Plaza Huincul and you strike oil. Dig sideways into the surrounding badlands and you strike dinosaurs - not ordinary ones, but the largest creatures ever to walk the Earth. This small city of around 13,000 people in the Patagonian desert of Neuquen sits on rock so generous that it gave its name to a geological formation: the Huincul Formation, a band of stone from the Late Cretaceous that has yielded a roll call of giants - Argentinosaurus, Giganotosaurus, Mapusaurus. Few towns this size hold such an outsized place in the history of life on the planet.

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Plaza Huincul: Pasto Verde's Frontier

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 wh...

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Plaza Huincul: The Oil Camp

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Plaza Huincul: The Tree That Was a Titan

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 t...

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Plaza Huincul: The Pack Hunters

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 a...

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