Puerto Madryn

Our Expedition Leader, Tom Ritchie, was speaking when I began to drift off, perhaps even doze. It had been a busy couple of days in Patagonia and while the body was tired, my imagination was on fire. "After the Tertiary and the extinction of the dinosaurs, it wasn't the mammals who first ruled the earth…" The sun was just rising over the water at our backs lighting up a strange and most beautiful landscape before us. A flat plane opened wide whose edges lapped in low hills at the base of distant mountains. The air was warming and thin tissues of fog rose here and there above marshy grasslands where small woods were scattered about on drier ground. At the edge of the nearest stand of rather bizarre trees ran a stream of clear, cold water. As I knelt down to wash the salt from my face and mouth there was a harsh and raucous screech from the woods, bird-like, but stronger and then a scream, all human and terrified. I sprang to my feet and I was nose-to-beak with four hundred pounds of feathered carnivore, it stank of death, my death most likely. "…it was the birds who became the dominate large land predators," continued Tom, as I fled my dream. "And here in Patagonia, none was probably more formidable than the Terror Bird, Paraphysornis brasilienis, whose skeleton we saw at the remarkable Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio this morning. It had wings, but they were relatively small about the size of a turkey's, useful only for stability while running. It stood higher than a man, carried at least twice his weight, and extrapolating from the modern ostrich, could run down prey with a burst of speed of up to 40 mph! But this was no grazer or browser; you saw the massive skull with that huge mouth. Picture that jaw sheathed with a razor-sharp, hooked beak and you can be glad that you were not one of those cute little mammals it was hunting!" Yes, the museum was extraordinary, with a fine collection of dinosaurs and other fossils artfully presented. There were layers and layers of the past, each revealed each brought to life, allowing us to not only know, but also to feel and maybe always remember the long story that we now call Patagonia.