La Plata Museum

The La Plata Museum is a natural history museum in La Plata, Argentina. It is part of the Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo (Natural Sciences School) of the UNLP (National University of La Plata).

The building, 135 meters (443 feet) long, today houses 3 million fossils and relics (including 44,000 botanical items), an amphitheatre, opened in 1992, and a 58,000-volume library, serving over 400 university researchers. Around 400,000 visitors (8% of whom are from outside Argentina) pass through its doors yearly, including a thousand visiting researchers.

Childhood excursions with his father and older brother led the 14-year-old Francisco Moreno to mount a display of his growing collection of anthropological, fossil and bone findings at his family's Buenos Aires home in 1866, unwittingly laying the foundations for the future La Plata Museum.

Moreno spent the time between 1873 and 1877 exploring his country's then-remote and largely unmapped Patagonia, becoming the first non-indigenous Argentine to reach Lake Nahuel Huapi and what was later named Lago Argentino ("Argentine Lake") and its imposing glacier (named Perito Moreno Glacier in his honor). The large body of man-made and paleontological samples he gathered and carefully classified during this survey (which also led to the first border demarcation treaty with neighboring Chile, in 1881) led to his establishment of the Buenos Aires Archaeological and Anthropological Museum in 1877.

Internationally respected naturalists such as Paul Broca and Rudolf Virchow contributed valuable donations to the institution, which was incorporated into the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum. The 1882 establishment of the city of La Plata as the new capital of the Province of Buenos Aires led the provincial legislature to requisition the collection in 1884 for the construction of a new facility set in a northside park, designed by renowned urbanist Charles Thays.

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