Living on the costa

Before everything was a field, it was the seabed. Actually, almost everything. Paleontology reconstructs life on planet Earth and its findings date back to almost unlikely times. If it is not easy to imagine life just a few thousand years ago, proposing to the brain a journey of more than 200 million years can be complicated, although it is possible. Dinosaurs were beginning to populate the planet and the continents were still far from being distributed in a way remotely similar to the current one. There was no ocean yet Atlantic and by then a coral reef was already living in what, 200 million years later, ended up being the municipality of Estepona. Along with other fossils from various parts of Andalusia and a collection of replicas of dinosaur skeletons found in The Patagonia of Argentinathe coral reef can be seen in the Paleontological Museum of Estepona.

Yes with Steven’s movie Spielberg jurassic-park (1993), paleontology monopolized some spotlights among the general public, the decade of the 90s ended with the label of boring hanging on the character of ross in friends. But the attraction to the dinosaurs that Spielberg’s film created would no longer be deactivated, with the public paying for the frequency of fashions, they are a claim for the spectacular nature of the remains of a remote time or the recreations of already extinct animals. Imagination also has its point in the experience of a museum of this type that allows you to have a different vision of time, geographical elements and life itself on the planet. The coral reef stopped living about 210 million years ago, and it is the oldest fossil found in Estepona. The Malaga town has sites such as El Velerín, where many fossils have been found, especially from the Pliocene epic (less than five million years), but its museum also has heritage found in the Sierra Norte de Sevilla, Casares and other points of Andalusia.

The Paleontological Museum of Estepona expanded its holdings this winter and offers a journey through different eras with several rooms and also geological elements beyond fossils. Another of the claims in the exhibition space are the replicas of dinosaurs found in the Argentine region of Patagonia. More specifically, of some of those exposed in the Paleontological Museum Egidio Feruglio MEF from the Argentine city of Trelew. One of the reference centers in the discipline and that has more than 180 bones that have made it possible to reconstruct the largest dinosaur skeleton in the world, the patagotitan. A titanosario 40 meters long and eight meters high that was excavated in 2013 along with six other giant herbivores in the province of Chubut, in southern Argentina. It is the jewel of the MEF center that also has other highly studied and spectacular elements.

In Estepona you can see a replica of the skeleton of the Piatnitzkysaurus floresia dinosaur also found in Chubut and described by José Fernando Bonaparte in 1979. It is an animal whose remains have also been found in other parts of the world and gives a good account of a Jurassic animal that has been recreated in the films on the subject and has a size that is not as exorbitant as most when compared with a human. It is not the only one in the Estepona facilities that dedicates one of its rooms to replicas of dinosaur skeletons. In addition, you can see an exhibition of current marine molluscs, fossils from the different terrestrial stages, rocks and minerals, among which those found in Sierra Bermeja, or an exhibition of marine invertebrates from the Pliocene. It is in the bullring of Estepona and is not far from some of the Roman sites on the west coast of Malaga.