Florentino Ameghino

Florentino Ameghino
Florentino Ameghino
Born	(1854-09-18)September 18, 1854 Luján
Died	August 6, 1911(1911-08-06) (aged 56) Buenos Aires
Nationality	Argentine
Fields	Paleontology
Influences	Charles Darwin Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Charles Lyell
Influenced	Juan Bautista Ambrosetti
Notable awards	Bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle (1889) for Mammalian Fossils in the Argentine Republic.

Florentino Ameghino (September 18, 1854 – August 6, 1911) was an Argentine naturalist, paleontologist, anthropologist and zoologist, whose fossil discoveries on the Argentine Pampas, especially on Patagonia, rank with those made in the western United States during the late 19th century. Along with his two brothers –Carlos and Juan– Florentino Ameghino was one of the most important founding figures in South American paleontology.

From 1887 until his death, Ameghino passionately devoted to the study of fossil mammals from Patagonia, with the valuable support of his brother Carlos Ameghino (1865-1936) who, between 1887 and 1902, made 14 trips to that region, where he discovered and collected numerous fossil faunas and made important stratigraphic observations which helped to support his journal Ameghiniana.

Born in Luján, son of Italian immigrants, Ameghino was a self-taught naturalist, and focused his study on the lands of the southern Pampas. He formed one of the largest collections of fossils of the world at the time, which served him as base for numerous geological and paleontological studies. Ameghino was a leading pioneer in the development of phylogenetics and of the paleontological approach of evolutionary biology. He also investigated the possible presence of prehistoric man in the Pampas and made several controversial claims about human origins in South America. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, president of Argentina 1868–1874, described Ameghino as "a countryman from Mercedes that nobody knows of here, but that is admired by scholars worldwide."

The Antiquity of Man in the Río de la Plata, later translated into French, was published in 1878. Phylogeny, published in 1884, was a theoretical work on developing an evolutionary concept in the Lamarckian vein, and led to the establishment of zoological taxonomy as a discipline with mathematical foundations. He later directed the Department of Zoology at the National University of Córdoba, which awarded him with an honorary doctorate, and was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences of Argentina.