The steppe of southern Patagonia is a rather dull sight: endless flat land with nothing but sparse, dry patches of colourless grass as far as you can see, in every direction. But things looked very different once upon a time, many many years ago, actually tens of millions of years ago before the Andes were created. At that time this area was covered in magnificent green forests of gigantic trees with dinosaurs of all sizes roaming around. The creation of the Andes range blocked out the rain coming from the Pacific, and put an end to this fertile region. However, we were able to see and touch the trunks of some of these 10 million year old trees which remain perfectly preserved - they have become stone! These petrified trees look exactly like real tree trunks, with different colours and even the age rings and bark. Only when you touch the trunk do you realize it is stone. We visit the bosque petrificado near Sarmiento full of petrified tree trunks.A different development over these tens of millions of years has been the creation of oil as evidenced by the many oil pumps around. And frequently when the companies drill for a new oil well they discover something else: dinosaur bones. This region has some of the worlds richest finds in Dinosaur bones and fossils. In the paleontologic museum in Trelew, we see bones of a massive animal that weighed 100 tons and some fossils of dinosaur eggs. In fact, recent increased drilling activity (probably fuelled by a high oil price) has led to more archeological finds than in past decades.
Thinking about time... petrified trees and dinosaur bones are the witnesses of a world of millions of years ago - by comparison it seems that the 10,000 year old handprints of the early humans in the Cueva de las Manos were only painted yesterday.
Pictures of the Bosque Petrificado
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