Mount Plataforma (I).
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Cerro Plataforma (Mount Platform) is a very curious mountain that resembles or reminds me about the Roraima highlands.
Cerro Plataforma is located in Argentina, at a distance of about two days walk from the southern side of Lake puelo, in Patagonia. This mountain is remarkable not just by its shape: it marks the entrance to the deep Turbio Valley, which is uncharted and where an impressive river is born out of huge contiental ice fields, but its most interesting characterisitc is that there you can find a significant number of fossils.
I saw this mountain for the first time during an expedition to Mount Roca del Tiempo, in 1984. From the peak of this mountain, about 60 km north from Cerro Plataforma, I could see its peculiar shape, and Ing. Braun, another member of that expedition told me what it was.
He also told me that a few years earlier, he met two palaeonthologists who brought back two backpacks filled to the top with fossils.
But only in 1992 did I visit the place for the first time, and in 1993 and 1994 I organised and directed two more research expeditions to the area with scientists from the La Plata Natural Sciences Museum, and during these expeditions we managed to extract and carry to the museum a good variety and number of specimens from secondary and early tertiary eras.
Among these specimens, we counted brachiopods, crabs, sea urchins, pinnae, pectinoids, turritelae, fossilised wood and others. We also collected some samples from vertebrates, such as what appears to be a pengüin and a shark. We also saw the remains and what appears to be a cetacean of some sort, thought we could not carry any samples from this one due to the lack of means to transport such huge units.
Mount Plataforma, as seen from the Turbio River.
