La Plata Museum (Museo de La Plata)
Natural history museum in La Plata's Paseo del Bosque, with fossil halls and anthropology collections.
The Museo de La Plata grew out of the collections that the explorer Francisco P. Moreno handed to the province of Buenos Aires, and it was formally created in 1884. A purpose-built home in the Paseo del Bosque, designed by the Swedish architect Enrique Aberg with Carlos Heynemann, was finished in 1888. Its curved neoclassical front carries a hexastyle portico flanked by bronze sabre-toothed cats modelled by Víctor de Pol. The museum passed to the National University of La Plata in 1906.
Some three million specimens are held across palaeontology, zoology, botany, geology, anthropology and archaeology, making this one of the largest natural history museums in Latin America. Twenty-one halls follow a single route and take in South American fossil mammals such as Megatherium and the glyptodonts, dinosaur skeletons, an Egyptian room and displays on Latin American archaeology. A long-standing service of student guides leads tours at fixed times each week.
Highlights
- Halls of South American fossil mammals and mounted dinosaur skeletons
- Bronze sabre-toothed cats by Víctor de Pol flanking the portico
- Twenty-one exhibition halls on one circular route
- Egyptian and Latin American archaeology rooms
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