Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum

The Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales Bernardino Rivadavia in Buenos Aires ( Avenida Angel Gallardo at the Parque del Centenario ) is adjacent to the La Plata Museum in La Plata the leading Natural History Museum in Argentina and simultaneously a research institute.

It is named after Bernardino Rivadavia, the first president of Argentina, on whose initiative the museum was founded in 1826 in a former Dominican monastery. It contained zoological, botanical and mineralogical collections and an Italian by the astronomer and physicist Ottaviano Fabrizio Mossotti ( the 1828 to 1835 there was ) equipped observatory, the first in Argentina, a weather station and an experimental physics laboratory. In 1835 the museum had to move again because the Dominicans were given back their monastery under President Juan Manuel de Rosas. After its replacement in 1852, the museum took a new lease and moved in 1854 to the former Jesuit Academy. In 1862, the German zoologist Hermann Burmeister ( 1807-1892 ), the director, who was in the country since 1857, on the recommendation of Alexander von Humboldt ( who had visited the museum in the 1820s ). Burmeister founded in 1870, the Argentine Paleontological Society and founded in 1874 the journal of the museum. Mid-1920s, new buildings built for the expanding collections, and under Juan Perón in the 1940s. Since 1996, the museum is operated by the National Research Council CONICET Argentina.

In the museum, among other exhibits from the specific fossil mammal fauna of the Tertiary are issued ( as Glyptodon, Smilodon and Megatherium ) for which Argentina is known since the 19th century, and dinosaur remains from Patagonia ( who Argentina also made ​​known in paleontology ) as Carnotaurus, Eoraptor, Patagosaurus, Herrerasaurus. Also meteorite finds and exhibits from the Argentine involvement in Antarctica can be found in the museum, as well as an aquarium and a library.