For paleontologists studying the Miocene period in South America, which started about 23 million years ago and saw mammals diversifying in a warming world, a simple building in the town of La Victoria in the La Venta region of Colombia is a key destination. There, the Natural History Museum of La Tatacoa houses about 4000 well-preserved and often complete skeletons of animals, including Colombia’s biggest collection of ancient primates and specimens of rare ancient bats. But poor roads, which wash out when it rains, have reduced tourism and revenue and may force the museum to close. That would endanger the work of dozens of researchers who work with the museum’s collections each year. Paleontologists have started a petition asking the local government, which is responsible for the town’s key access road, to improve it; more than 2600 people have signed so far.
“This is one of the richest places in fossils in all of Colombia, all of South America, and the tropics,” says Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, a leading Colombian paleontologist who started the petition earlier this month. Testifying to the region’s importance, international researchers have named the span from 13.8 million to 11.8 million years ago, within the Miocene period, the Laventan age. “We have to save this museum,” Jaramillo says.
Mónica Carvalho, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan, notes another way in which this museum is special. “It’s clearly driven, created, and maintained by the local community,” she says.
Today, the so-called Tatacoa Desert near the museum is actually a dry forest with orange, dunelike rock formations. But 12 million years ago, it was a humid tropical forest with tall trees and rich biodiversity, especially of mammals. High silica content in the region’s freshwaters preserved the skeletons in great detail, including microscopic structures such as cells, says Edwin Cadena Rueda, a paleontologist at the University of the Rosary. The fossils offer an exceptional opportunity to study how climatic and environmental change influenced animal evolution, says Juan Carrillo, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Fribourg. Paleontologists have published more than 200 papers describing fossils from the region. The most recently collected specimens in those papers are housed at the Tatacoa museum, which opened in 2014.
Paleontological research in the region dwindled in the early 2000s because of guerilla conflict. But Andrés Vanegas and his brother, Rubén, amateur paleontologists from La Victoria, a small town north of the desert, collected fossils from the area and kept them in shoeboxes and plastic containers. By 2019, as the conflict ended, the Vanegas brothers and Jaramillo had gathered donations from national and international institutions—including the University of the Rosary, the American Geophysical Union, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute—to preserve the fossils locally, rather than shipping them away to other continents. The brothers turned their grandfather’s house into a museum. A donation from the late NASA astronaut William Anders and his wife funded a lab to prepare and study the fossils, and paleontologists—from other regions in Colombia and also from other countries—came to the museum to study the fossils. Now, when researchers collect fossils from the Tatacoa Desert, they add most of them to the private museum’s collection, rather than taking them to their own institutions, Andrés Vanegas says. “It is the Colombians, the locals, who are fighting for the fossils to remain there,” says Javier Luque, an invertebrate paleontologist at the University of Cambridge.
“It’s a very beautiful collection, [and] from a scientific point of view, it is very, very valuable,” says Julia Tejada, a paleobiologist at the California Institute of Technology who visited the museum last year. “This museum is really sophisticated for the place where it is.”
The museum creates a sense of identity for the community and benefits it, adds ecologist Luz Helena Oviedo from Parque Explora. Before the museum was built, La Victoria had no pharmacy or ATM, but the town has grown thanks to the tourists drawn to the museum. About 25 locals, including children, volunteer there, according to a paper from last year detailing the importance of the museum.
But the unpaved road to La Victoria is deteriorating, discouraging visitors. The Vanegas brothers are struggling to keep the museum afloat. With no support from the government, the staff of five relies on entrance fees and souvenir sales, which have plummeted, museum Director Andrés Vanegas says. Researchers help by hiring staff as preparators or as guides during fieldwork, but more revenue is needed. Vanegas says he’s had to take out loans to keep the museum running and calculates he can only do so for six more months.
Jaramillo’s petition demands the government pave the town’s 20-kilometer access road. It emphasizes the museum's significance as a repository of the most complete fossil collection of the Tatacoa Desert, which was recently nominated for UNESCO World Heritage status. The governor of Huila and the mayor of Villavieja, the state and municipality officials who oversee La Victoria, didn’t respond to Science’s request for comment. Yesterday, Huila’s secretary for roadways and infrastructure announced temporary repair works on the highway. But Vanegas says those repairs won’t work long-term. “The solution is to pave it.”
In addition to the primates and bats, the museum holds exquisite fossils of fish, caimans, giant turtles, plants, dolphins, birds, and amphibians. Last year, researchers described the skull of an extinct saber-toothed marsupial, Anachlysictis gracilis, housed at the museum, allowing them to know more about its diet and size.
If the museum closes, the fossils’ future is uncertain—they might be transferred to the National Geological Museum José Royo y Gómez in Bogotá, Jaramillo says. He and Vanegas remain hopeful it will not come to that. “There is still much to collect, and of what is [already] collected, there is still much to study,” says Carrillo, who is now describing an ancient anteater stored at the museum.
