Nestled involving the Andes and also the Pacific, the sparse desert surrounding this outpost in southern Peru appears like one of many world’s most desolate areas. Barren mountains rise from windswept valleys. Dust devils dance from dune to another.
But for the bone hunters who stalk the Ocucaje Desert every day, the punishing winds here have exposed a medley of life and evolution: a prehistoric graveyard where sea monsters stumbled on rest 40 million years back. These parched lands, once washed over through the sea, guard probably the most coveted troves of marine fossils recognized to paleontology.
Discoveries here include gigantic fossilized teeth from your legendary 50-foot shark known as the megalodon, the bones of your huge penguin with surprisingly colorful feathers as well as the fossils from the Leviathan Melvillei, a whale with teeth longer than these from the Tyrannosaurus rex, which makes it a contender for your largest predator ever to prowl the oceans.
But beyond the boon to science, the discoveries here have attracted the attentions of some other class of fossil hunters too: smugglers. Officials inside the capital, Lima, say seizures of illegally collected fossils are climbing.
Peru is astonishingly abundant with archaeological and paleontological sites, so much in fact how the issue is a component of your delicate political debate here. Loosing national treasures to collectors from abroad has trigger concerns about sovereignty, perhaps best exemplified from the feud between Peru and Yale University over Inca artifacts taken by Hiram Bingham, the American explorer typically credited with revealing the lost town of Machu Picchu for the outside world century ago.
For the time being, the Ocucaje remains available to virtually anybody who would like to look for fossils here. Peruvian law, while vague, classifies fossils as national patrimony as well as fossils based in the country to stay in Peru, unless special permission is granted.
But enforcement and preservation here appears like a distant dream. The federal government controls the desert but leases parts to mining companies, that could damage or destroy fossils. Looters have previously ravaged archaeological burial sites about the desert’s fringes. The authorities rarely even go into the area.
Almost the only real four-wheeled vehicles one sees traversing the desert are trucks carrying workers who spend weeks around the coast collecting seaweed. You can choose from to dealers, who then export it to Asia.
“This desert is horrible,” said Yolanda Gutiérrez, 35, a seaweed harvester. “The only things someone sees are dirt and rocks and bones.”
Selection of fossil hunters have their particular visions of the way the Ocucaje ought to be managed. One prominent view arises from Roberto Penny Cabrera, 54, an early naval officer who says he's a descendant of Jerónimo Luis de Cabrera, the conquistador who founded the nearby town of Ica in 1563.
Mr. Penny Cabrera, who guides both backpackers and paleontologists in to the Ocucaje, lives in the aristocratic family’s crumbling yellow mansion on Ica’s square.
“I am a patriot, a Peruvian, and where my foot steps that's patrimony,” he explained, contending that a number of the Ocucaje’s fossils ought to be left on your lawn. Another option, he explained, should be to produce a museum - not in Lima, a lesser amount of Berlin or Paris - however in Ica.
Around the streets of Ica and nearby towns, visitors can already see such fossils - and purchase them. Merchants sell fossilized shark teeth, concerning the sized a man’s hand, at prices from $60 to $100 apiece. İt is said other fossils can be found, at higher prices. “Ocucaje yields many bones,” said one merchant, Marcos Conde, 35.
Meanwhile, seizures of illegally obtained fossils are increasing, surpassing 2,200 this season, in contrast to about 800 this past year, largely at Lima’s airport terminal, said José Apolín with the Ministry of Culture’s office of recovery. Sometimes officials come across large fossils by chance; in 2008 law enforcement found a jawbone regarded as that relating to a mastodon inside the cargo your hands on a bus.
Recent discoveries elsewhere in Peru are raising curiosity about the country’s fossils and also the possibility of more trafficking. Almost 14,000 feet an excellent source of the Andes, as an example, a mining company controlled by Australian and Swiss investors announced a startling discovery this past year: a lot more than 100 dinosaur footprints baked into walls of stone.
Rodolfo Salas, paleontology curator at Lima’s Natural History Museum, said evidence that his institution obtained, including photos of fossils available by private dealers, indicated that the Ocucaje was especially vulnerable. He was quoted saying the trade was sustained by huaqueros, or looters of archaeological sites, who looked to fossil hunting.
Paleontologists working here fear the robbery of the discoveries. After getting a fossil considered to be a 35-million-year-old whale cranium, they led by Mr. de Muizon camouflaged the find with burlap before it may be removed to cover it from looters.
The fossil hunters sometimes switch on the other person, too. In 2008, Mr. Penny Cabrera, who roams the Ocucaje in the battered four-wheel-drive Nissan, pushed for your authorities to arrest Mario Urbina-Schmitt, 48, a well-known researcher for Peru’s Natural History Museum, while he was working together with a French paleontologist, Gilles Cuny.
Mr. Urbina-Schmitt, who faces in time prison if convicted on charges of illegally removing fossils, said the truth against him was absurd, revealing disarray in properly regulating fossil collection. He also said the main focus on his case had shifted attention far from other episodes, being a 40-million-year-old whale fossil spirited from the desert. “My crime is always that I do great work,” he was quoted saying.
The debate over trafficking aside, paleontologists the prized fossils from the Ocucaje remain susceptible to another factor: erosion. “If we leave them inside the desert,” Mr. de Muizon said with the Ocucaje fossils, “they is going to be dead for that second time.”
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