By Irina Podgorny, CONICET/Archivo Histórico del Museo de La Plata, Argentina
In the second half of the 19th century and long before the dinosaur craze, every self-respecting museum had to have at least one glyptodon carapace, a mighty, armoured animal of gigantic dimensions that since 1839 was part of the catalogue of strange and gigantic fossil mammals coming from South America.
The first one arrived in the collections of the Royal College of Surgeons in London in the 1840s, and from then on there was no museum in the northern or southern hemisphere that did not wish and commission such a wonder. In London, Richard Owen called them Glyptodont, a generic name that emphasized the sculpted shape of their teeth, the element on which he based their existence.
The skeleton, and above all its shell, were not easy to transport: even if the carapace appeared with all or almost all its pieces, once extracted from the ground, it could break into hundreds of fragments. They were expensive, and the dealers of natural history specimens had to find a way to make what was disassembled in the pampas come together again on the other side of the ocean, or wherever it was installed. One of the solutions consisted in conceiving the carapace as a sort of Pompeian mosaic: numbered on paper and in each of its pieces, it was sent disassembled so that the plates (tesserae), once in the cabinet and with a great investment of time and work, could be recomposed in their ideal form. The glyptodonts we see today are the result of comparative anatomy and of the craftsmanship that combines the practices of carpentry, blacksmithing, and masonry.
However, once assembled, glued, and supported by a metal or wooden structure, the fragility of the assembly did not disappear. Thanks to this, in 1883, the director of the Public Museum of the city of Buenos Aires (then the capital of the province and not of the nation) invoked this fact to argue the impossibility of moving the collections to another building or another city. The glyptodonts, once armed, became sedentary and served to negotiate spaces, positions, and budgets.
At the end of the 19th century, the Museo de La Plata, the main museum of the new capital of the province of Buenos Aires established in 1882, for the lack of one installed a train, a true manifestation of the variety of armoured skeletons that the province could offer to the world. By doing so, it not only demonstrated the richness of the pampas: it showed the small and somewhat old-fashioned museum in the capital of the nation – now Museo Nacional – the dimensions that the exhibition of nature could acquire in the new institutions of the province.
Meanwhile, the glyptodont had been living for half a century as a museum specimen and populated, whole or in pieces, the halls, collections, and deposits of museums in dozens of cities around the world. This photo and these words are an invitation to review the nearest showcases to verify its presence and trace the paths of the glyptodont in world museums.
To read more:
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nathalie Richard (June 9, 2021). A train of glyptodonts, La Plata Museum, Argentina. SciCoMove — Scientific Collections on the Move. Retrieved April 28, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/twr8