“Museum of Palaeontology and Archaeology” said the card, written in green ink and taped to the lamp post. The arrows pointed to the left and I followed them, past the quad bikes and canoes, the carcases of pork, and round the corner to a vacant church hall.
The museum was a travelling exhibition, maps pinned on boards to show the movement of the continental plates from Pangaia to the formation of the Americas, the evolution of life from amino acids to bacteria to marine life, and an array of plaster models showing the evolution of whales.
The world´s greatest marine fossil site is just 150 km south or here, in the Occucaje desert where whales and sharks, crocodiles and turtles, evolved in shallow seas for tens of million years.
They included whales with a single line of teeth down the centre of the palate, whales with hundreds of teeth not in a line but in a grid, like a crushing machine, and the first whales who had no teeth at all but bare bone, an extension of the skull, shaped to make a pair of scissors between the upper and lower jaw.