Argentina - Geological, Paleontological and Archaeological Provincial Reserve Pehuén co - Monte Hermoso

AREA I from 38° 59' 43'' S / 61° 39' 00'' W to 39° 00' 10'' S / 61° 34' 30'' W AREA II from 39° 00' 13'' S / 61° 32' 30'' W to 38° 59' 23'' S / 61° 27' 30'' W AREA III from 38° 59' 19'' S / 61° 20' 54'' W to 38° 59' 17'' S / 61° 21' 59'' W The Provincial Natural Reserve Pehuén co - Monte Hermoso is placed in the districts of Coronel L. Rosales and Monte Hermoso, in the South of the Province of Buenos Aires. It covers an area of approximately 16,2 km2 along the beaches, with an East-West oriented axis, in a very special and well-preserved coastal-sea environment. In this place, it is preserved, in a section carved by the marine ingression of the Holocene, a geological, paleontological and archeological record of exceptional characteristics. In an extension of about 25 km, different sedimentary formations, whose age decreases from West to East, give us detailed information about the history of life and changes in the landscape over the last 5 million years. Amazingly, although many geographical, climate and biological changes occurred during these years, the conditions enabling the preservation of traces - to a greater or a lesser degree - of the different actors coming and going of that changeable scenery were repeated. In that limited area, where the oldest visible rocks are continental sediments of the Upper Tertiary, there is an almost unique record that evidences the transformations during the last times of the Cenozoic isolation of South America until the Holocene. For this reason, along some kilometers of beaches, which are enlightened with the rising and the setting of the sun of the Atlantic during summer, rocks evoke very different landscapes formed over time and have been inhabited by species living before and after the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI). The history written in these strata ends with the last big change of the Quaternary, a process that produced the extinction of dozens of mammals of a South American and North American lineage, the subsequent rising of the sea level as wells as the exploration and the subsequent settlement of old hunter-gatherers who inhabited that place during the early and mid Holocene.