A few years ago, they were building a road near one of the most beautiful little tourist towns you will find anywhere: Villa de Leyva, Colombia. And they found a giant fossilized skeleton of a kronosaurus. They kept the fossil intact and built a museum around it. The Museo del Fosil -- everybody's Spanish is good enough to translate that into English -- is on the other side of the highway. On this side of the highway is the Centro de Investigaciones Paleontológicas, the Paleontological Research Center.
Villa de Leyva, already having been a tourist town, was the perfect location for the two paleontology museums that sprung up as a result of this discovery. One museum features the star attraction, the kronosaurus. The other features the larger collection of smaller fossils found in this area, from before the time the three ranges of the Andes rose and cut this area off from the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea.
Villa de Leyva is accessible only by bus or car. It's about four hours north of Bogota. I visited in November 2017.
No comments:
Post a Comment